formatting an external hard drive on the pandora

[peacelovefleshbones]

Yea, basically that. What is the best way to format one, the best file system to use for stability and etcetera. Also, is it possible to use dosfstools fdisk to do it and if so, what is the location name of a given usb device? It's also pretty imperitive that it be possible on the pandora.


If someone can redirect me to another thread already covering this topic I'm just going to stop making threads...

Also, I dont know why the topic has the word caanoo at the front. Sorry about that.

 

[Pickle]

there was a port of gparted which is nice tool for this sort of thing

 

[peacelovefleshbones]

there was a port of gparted which is nice tool for this sort of thing

I have gparted, but it doesnt recognize or pick up the hard drive when I plug it in. Even when I use a usb hub.

 

[Prometheus]

I've fixed the topic title and moved this to the Support section, if that's alright.

 

[gruso]

I have gparted, but it doesnt recognize or pick up the hard drive when I plug it in. Even when I use a usb hub.

Is the drive being recognised in Thunar?

Are you on a Super Zaxxon beta that has USB disabled by default?

 

[peacelovefleshbones]

Im on superzaxxon b4 and I made sure to enable usb. It doesnt show up in thunar. At first I thought it was because it was formatted to ntfs so I formatted it to exfat on my brothers windows pc. Didnt work either.


EDIT: let me bite my tongue on that. I thought I should try it again since I reflashed my system last night. It still didnt show up in thunar but it did finally show up in gparted. I have no idea why it wouldnt before. Bu since I have it now, would anyone like to offer a suggestion as to how I could format it for maximum stability?

 

[sebt3]

Im on superzaxxon b4 and I made sure to enable usb. It doesnt show up in thunar. At first I thought it was because it was formatted to ntfs so I formatted it to exfat on my brothers windows pc. Didnt work either.

what does the lsusb command say ?

 

[peacelovefleshbones]

I have no idea what that is, but it doesnt seem to be a problem anymore (sorry about my last seconf edit on my last post). My real bad luck has come from partitioning and formatting things. I have been trying to find a way to format my 128GB sd card in a away that is fast and stable like other people have been able to with little luck (). This is mostly because my lack of knowhow on the subject. So basically I just want to find a way to not make the same mistakes I have in the past on this hard drive.

 

[Grench]

Right now the Pandora will not show a ExFAT partition in Thunar.


You should be able to get the physical device to show up in gparted if it is inserted before gparted is opened.


You will not be able to format it as FAT32 without first installing the DOSFS tools - which is a bit of a pain. However, you can read/write to it if you format it as FAT32 and don't care if it looses extended file attributes capabilities(advanced topic).


So the simple answer is, for now - If you want the greatest interoperability between this USB drive and the Pandora and other machines, go to another machine and format the partition as FAT32. You should then be able to plug it into the Pandora and have it 'just appear'.


Grench

 

[WizardStan]

You will not be able to format it as FAT32 without first installing the DOSFS tools

It's there. I'm not sure if gparted uses it correctly or not, but you can definitely format fat32 from the command line right out of the box, at least.

 

[peacelovefleshbones]

I would like to clarify a few things that have come to my attention.


Yes gparted worked, yes I had to install dosfstools first (which I had luckily already done by the time I got the hard drive), and yes you could do it in terminal too (the address for a usb device is /dev/sda as it turns out).


My mistake the first time trying with the hard drive is that I had gparted open before I plugged it in.


It now works perfectly between both windows and the pandora.


As it turns out it's actually quite easy to format an sd card with either dosfstools fdisk or gparted (except when trying to format it to ext3). The reason I thought otherwise is because it would always give me trouble when I wrote things to it which i did with varying degrees of success. I fond out that my sd cards read only switch was physically broken and when I tried to physically fix it the entire card fell apart from what I am going to say was cheap plastic casing. 120 dollars down the drain. sucks hardcore balls.


I still dont know what the error was that kept occuring when I tried to interface my sd card with a windows pc but my next sd cards will be exclusively pandora (thanks to the added functionality of my new hard drive).


Thank you guys for your help.


EDIT: wizardstan is right, dosfstools IS there out of the box. what I meant to say is that you need to UPDATE dosfstools in terminal using neartoas instructions found here: http://boards.openpa...-first-on-this/


Now, neartao put complete instructions on how to partition and format to fat32 with dosfstools but instructions on how to do ext2 and presumably more can be found here:


Setting up an Ext2 filesystem


note that you have to change /dev/sda to /dev/mmcblk0 or /dev/mmcblk1 depending on which sd card you want to format. mmcblk0 is the card you inserted first, mmcblk1 is the one you inserted second.


when doing the final step you use /dev/mmcblk0p1 or mmcblk1p1 to select what partition to format.


I assume all of these rules apply when formatting a hard drive but ike I said earlier, its actually pretty painless to do in gparted. Except with ext3. Doesnt quite work yet for whatever reason. Also, I can't vouch for ext2 on a hard drive since I havent tried it but from what I understand ext2 isnt a good choice if you are going between systems like I am.