formatting external harddisk

[Philippe Landau]

Gavin Hemphill wrote:
>    There's a slight gotcha when you are using disks formated on a ppc 
> system with an X86 based system.  
ah. thank you for your feedback, Gavin.

> 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.
ah, so back to the command line interface
where i swim like a frog in the sky ...

dmesg says:

usb 3-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
SCSI subsystem initialized
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.
usb-storage: device found at 3
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
   Vendor: SAMSUNG   Model: SP2014N           Rev: VC10
   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
usb-storage: device scan complete
SCSI device sda: 390721969 512-byte hdwr sectors (200050 MB)
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sda: 390721969 512-byte hdwr sectors (200050 MB)
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
  /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, 
filesystem will b e case sensitive!
program gparted is using a deprecated SCSI ioctl, please convert it to SG_IO

is there anything i need to do to be able
to read from and write to this fat32 partition ?

kind regards     philippe

--
> 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
>>
>>