Linux format external USB hard disk Partition

by Posted on

Q. I have an external new hard drive connected using USB port under Red Hat Fedora Core Linux. I want to use it for backup. There are two partition /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2. This hard disk was setup and formatted by friend under Windows XP (NTFS partition). Now I want to format and use one partition for Linux and another for Windows XP.

How do I format sda1 without losing data from /dev/sda2?

A. To format /dev/sda1 as Linux ext3 partition use command mkfs.ext3. It is used to create an ext2/ext3 filesystem

Type the command as follows:
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1

Before hitting [enter] key make sure you double check partition device name (/dev/sda1). If unsure make backup of important data on USB pen or DVD disk.

Posted by: SXI ADMIN

The author is the creator of SXI LLC and a seasoned sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and a trainer for the Linux operating system/Unix shell scripting. Get the latest tutorials on SysAdmin, Linux/Unix and open source topics via RSS/XML feed or weekly email newsletter.

Published by SXI ADMIN