I picked up a 750 gigabyte Seagate Free Agent Pro drive. The drive is formatted with ntfs. Rather than typing commands like mk2efs myself, I installed a wonderful utility called gparted. Once the right device is selected, click on the partition you want to format. If you formatted the drive as ext3 in step 1, you can use e2label from the e2fsprogs set of utilities to give your drive a persistent name. If there is no label, you will get back a blank line. The final command reads the label back. If the drive has already spun down, you can unplug it, reboot everything, and plug it back in. Or are you going to keep to the company line. Google have sent me an email to let me know of the decision but I cannot write back — it is no reply — come on, how hard is it to just let this run. When systems are set up already it must cost to take this away. Running graphical programs using sudo can be 100% fine, or it can cause all sorts of problems. Additionally, you can make shortcuts launchers. Thanks for the good reference regarding naming disks… I understand your frustration, Leslie. Leslie, I have no idea. Tim Wintle, you warmed the cockles of my heart. Hey Matt, Thanks for the Linux post. I had to look at Wikipedia to realize that Ubuntu is an ubuntu format usb command line system which is a primarily desktop focused version of Linux. What is Linux like for those with less coding skill to use. How would it work in an office enviroment where most of the people have no programming experience and are regular M. My only question — Why not Fiesty. I liked Core 8, but found it to be more of a dog on my gear. From there, you can learn and still play around while remaining productive with a Windows box. I have been wondering for a long time whether to get it or not. I currently have Dell Inspiron 1100 with 2. With all these applications, my computer is running very slow. I am wondering whether Ubuntu would make the operation faster. Any info would be great. Thanks for opening the Linux chapter Matt. I installed gparted but still it does not work. What I really want to do is format the disk. When I first attach the disk, I am using using Ubuntu 7. What could be the problem. Regards, Pushkaraj Pune, India Dr. In truth, my own experience with Ubuntu the last version I tried was Feisty Fawn — currently the next-to-newest release was quite poor. Going 100% open source is a noble and extremely educational endeavour and I wish you luck. There is also great support for ubuntu: see ubuntuforums. I bought a lap top from Packard Bell only for it to have problem after problem and even though it was still under warranty at the time they did nothing to help me out. So I gave up on it as it was going to cost too much for a new cpu and hard disk than it was worth. A cheap way around having something that looks like Mac without the greatness of Mac. I have now starting converting windows users that have bought brand new computers with Vista to Ubuntu. I have a series of cron tasks that are supposed to routinely back up my data to a Seagate, and the spin down was a horrible nuisance. Both the qparted tip and the 32label worked for me. The only thing I would add is that the user is going to need to change the permissions on the external hard drive to their user account if they are using Hardy, because Hardy set the ownership of my Iomega external hard drive as root. Some end users might not think of that. The symptom that I was experiencing was trouble writing to the external hard drive. Christian Einfeldt, Producer, The Digital Tipping Point At first, thank you Matt for the tips. What I got was just error 15 in grub. The Ubuntu version I use is 8. I have followed advices to solve the problem. Basically just for fun since my plan was to install Ubuntu 8. And luckily, I ubuntu format usb command line full backup before shutting down the machine yesterday night. But in any case, it would be nice to understand what happened. If you are going to run a production studio environment, formatting your external hard-drives is essentially a must. Thanks and keep up the informative posts. Regards, Harrison I have just gone through the process of launching a reviews and guides website. I read and wrote reviews on over 50 including several about the necessity of backup. I have 2 on my system and yes, my Cand D drives are backed up. I am ashamed to say the backup is at least 6 months old. I need to practice what I preach. I am thinking of either getting a Seagate Free Agent Xtreme or a. Matt, on a similar note: I recently ubuntu format usb command line to Ubuntu 9.
