formatting external harddisk

[Gavin Hemphill]

Philippe:
    There's a slight gotcha when you are using disks formated on a ppc 
system with an X86 based system.  I do it all the time but the problem 
is that fdisk on the ppc knows about Mac partition tables and fdisk on 
the x86 does not.  The kernel distributed by ubuntu knows about Mac 
partition tables though and if you look in the dmesg log  or messages 
log you'll find a listing of the partitions it finds on the disk.  The 
best thing to do is to note the partition number(s) that you have 
formated for ext3 or whatever and use them when you mount on the X86 
box.  For example I have a big paper label on the drive I move between 
Mac's and X86 listing the partition 3 as HFS+ and partition 4 as ext3.  
I also use an e2label on the ext3 partition and mount it by label just 
to make it even easier.
    G++

Philippe Landau wrote:

>>>>>> found no GUI formatting tool (is there one ?)
>>>>>
>>>>> GParted
>>>>
>>>> i installed it now, switched to sda,
>>>> created a disk label (default: dos),
>>>> clicked on "unallocated", new partition, fat32,
>>>> apply but get "Error while creating /dev/sda1"
>>>
>>> You have to make sure it's unmounted when trying to format a drive
>>> with gparted.
>>
>> how can i unmount it ?
>
>
> after successfully formatting it yesterday,
> today after reboot it gets mounted automatically,
> but shows only 1022 MB free space of the 190 GB.
> now when i look at it in gparted again,
> i see 1022 MB unused, 189'758 MB used, fat32.
> now i know gparted is not supported in Ubuntu.
>
> does Ubuntu offer a way to format an external harddisk
> and transition data from Mac OS X to Linux ?
>
> kind regards     philippe
>
>
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