[USB SATA connection] Changing file system from NTFS to Ext3

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 6:29 PM, Ted Hilts <thilts at mcsnet.ca> wrote:
> Liam Proven wrote:
> Couple of things.
>
> [1] Your external drive. Either you can use USB *or* you can use
> eSATA, but *not both*.
>
> [2] Why not just reformat the external as ext3 or better still for
> that size ext4, then?
>
> I am using USB not eSATA.

OK. That's fine. If you have the option, eSATA is a lot faster, though.

> For the moment let's say that I do your point [2] -- would there be any
> difference between using the mount and umount commands when compared to a
> regular IDE mount and umount as in "sudo umount /media/xxxx" and then
> formating using the command (which would be ? -- I don't know) and then
> "sudo mount /media/xxxx"?

No.

> The "xxxx" is one item confusing me as to-date all
> the IDE disks are "sdc1" as an example or sde1" etc!  None are HD type. This
> does not seem right to treat the USB connection as if it were an SD type.

Ignore it. Basically, the "hd??" for disk device names was historical
& these days they're all called "sd??".

> Maybe it should be a special type -- I don't know.  Is there a special
> designation for external USB connections?

No.

> The system called the connection
> EXTERNAL.

That is probably just the volume label of the drive.

> What if I just designated the external drive as HD or SD or some
> other designation -- what would happen???

You can't change its device name (the /dev/sde or whatever name).

> Also, my Ubuntu is 8.04 (Hardy)

OK, well, in that case, it's too old and ext4 isn't an option, so just
go with ext3.

8.04 is the current long-term support release but it's a bit old now.
The next LTS release comes out at the end of next month & will be
quite a big change, so after leaving it a while to stabilise, you
might want to upgrade to that. I'd suggest waiting a month or so,
though.

> updated from 7.10. The Kernel has advanced up to 2.6.24-27-rt and I use
> GNOME 2.22.1.  Also, the most advanced filesystem I have in SBIN is
> /sbin/fsck.ext3 and /sbin/mkfs.ext3 so importing ext4 onto the system may
> cause a conflict with my present kernel.

It's not that, but realistically, it's not possible. Just forget about it.

>  It is my understanding that Ext4
> was ready only on Ubuntu 10. What do you think?

No, not really, it's been quite usable for a year or so now. I stick
with ext3, personally, though.

>  So, Ive got a couple of
> concerns -- maybe you or someone else could address for me.  Since you will
> probably ask I will tell you ahead. I do not want to upgrade to 9.x and
> higher (for a while) and am installing 2 very up-to-date systems (Deb and
> Ubuntu).

Deb and Ubuntu? "Deb" is not a Linux distribution. /Debian/ is, but
it's for hard-core Linux experts, really. Ubuntu is basically a
simpler, easier version of Debian.

"Deb" on the other hand, or more normally "DEB" or ".DEB" (dot-deb),
is the software packaging format shared by Ubuntu, Debian and all
other Debian-derivatives, such as Xandros.

So which are you talking about?

> So I do want to stick with the current Ubuntu machine and I like
> it very much.and I have specialty applications I run on it -- last major
> update (to 8.04) automatically got rid of these applications and I don't
> want that to happen again.  I might just keep 8.04 (plus) just for the sake
> of these applications.

Well, it is supported for a while yet, but many things will get
progessively harder as it becomes more & more obsolete. I'd suggest
keeping with the current long-term-support release, at least.

> Please advise -- Thanks, Ted Hilts.

Could I ask you to space out your posts a little more with a few more
paragraphs & so on? It's very dense and a little hard to follow.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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