Hard Drives mounting icon and formating

[Chanchao]

> On Tuesday 09 May 2006 23:07, Richard wrote:
> Coming from a Mac desktop, I'm use in having  the hard drives,
> mounted (shown) on the desktop
> then I would access the hard drive for files..etc.

Yes, easy! :)  I like that too.  It's actually VERY easy, all you have
to do is click on the Places menu, the hard drives should all be in
there. (If not then go read the bits on mounting drives on the Ubuntu
wiki site)  Anyway, from the Places menu, just click on a drive, and
drag it on to the desktop and voila.. :)   Windows users will be happy
to note that you can also do this with 'Computer' and just about
anything else you see in the menus.

(This works in Dapper, not sure about older versions.  but time to
upgrade to Dapper no matter what anyway. :)

Alan wrote:

> This is not advisable, it's not how Unix file systems work. Each drive 
> and partition on the drive mounts somewhere into a large directory 
> tree that starts at the root directory "/"

Well sorry but what a user prefers to see on his desktop screen has
nothing to do with Linux' filesystem.   With Gnome you can have any
folder (or drive, or share) showing on the desktop so I don't see why
this wouldn't be advisable.   It makes sense, it saves mouse clicks,
it's a good idea. 


> Now, I need to re-format the ATA drive (Storage)

> Q. (newbie) what format? I was looking at the disk gui,
> and there a several option: Since this drives, is only going to be
> used for dumping files....(mp3) .pdf..and whatever, (also this unit
> will be  shared) What format would work best, and Most important how
> would I do this.

When you say 'shared' you mean shared over a network, or shared by two
separate operating systems on the same computer?  If the latter then you
best make it vfat.  I've done this myself, I have Windows on NTFS which
isn't writable by Ubuntu, so I created a partition for my document files
that is FAT32, so it can be accessed (read AND write) by both Windows
and Ubuntu.

Now, if you're talking about a network share then the filesystem doesn't
matter.  Just use ext3.  But I hear a lot of good things about ReiserFS
lately, but haven't yet tried it for anything.

And then 'How' to do it: If you don't have it already, install gparted
(Gnome Partition Editor) using Synaptic Package manager.  This is a
graphical tool to do such things; create partitions, format
drives/partitions, etc.   Note that the drive has to be unmounted before
you can do anything with it though. (This can also be done with gparted)
It's quite a nice tool, mostly you can just right-click on something and
select one of the available actions.

Cheers,
Chanchao