New USB drive formatting

[Tim Frost]

On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 18:32 +0000, Dave M wrote:
> What is the procedure for formatting a new USB drive? I did the following 
> and it looks like it worked:
> 
> * Installing a new usb hard drive
>    - Turn on usb drive
>    - Plug in drives usb cable
>    - See if drive is recognized and what device it is (sda, sdb etc)
>      $dmesg
>    - If the drive mounts, unmount it
>       $sudo umount /dev/sda
>    - make ext3 file system
>       $sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda
Don't make a filesystem on the total drive.  Make the filesystem on a
partition (eg /dev/sda1) that has been created using fdisk.  

Running mkfs on the disk is likely to have over-written the partition
table on the first sector of the disk.



>    - Unplug and re-plug drive
>    - It should mount automatically
> 
> But when I did $mkfs and when I do $dmesg I see a warning that there is no 
> partition table:



Tim