Ubuntu
gparted package

Format External Hard Drive

Asked by D. Brown

I wish to format an external hard drive. The hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar WD3000JB 300 GB. I have Ubuntu 8.10 (WUBI) installed along side Windows XP SP3 on an Acer Aspire 3680. So how do I use Ubuntu to format the hard drive? Thanks!

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nhasian
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David Norton (norty) said : 		#1

I recommend you use a program called qtparted. It has a graphical user interface, which will allow you to select which drive to format. Of course, be very careful when doing this!

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Best nhasian (nhasian) said : 		#2

good question. go to System->Administration->Partition Editor. if you dont have it installed by default you can install it from a terminal with the command:

sudo apt-get install gparted

now you can use the Partition Editor to delete the existing partition (if one exists) and then create a new partition of the filesystem of your choice. if your only using the laptop on the linux computer EXT3 is the best choice. if you are going to move it to different comptuers then FAT32 or NTFS would be better.

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D. Brown (wangsuda2003) said : 		#3

Thanks to both of you. However, partition editor won't let me partition or reformat the drive. It is currently in NTFS format.

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#4

lol, sorry about that.

You'll need a more up-to-date version of gparted. Personally i tend to use gparted from a LiveCd of a tiny distro so that i just bootup the cd and don't have to worry about partitions being locked or anything like that (well maybe the linux-swap sometimes). My favourite for this would be Wolvix because it's faster to boot and startup Gparted
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wolvix

Alternatively there is bound to be some way of getting a higher version number gparted than the one in the repositories and it's probably quite easy, i just don't know how - hopefully someone else will describe it in here soon.

Err the Wubi is ok but a much better way to install Ubuntu is using this guide to dual-booting
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot
i think its quite easy to migrate everything across from the Wubi to this type of install but that would be a separate question

Regards and good luck from
Tom

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D. Brown (wangsuda2003) said : 		#5

Thank you all who have helped. I think I have figured this out - I can call up the drive on gparted, unmount it, and then reformat it. That should do the trick!

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D. Brown (wangsuda2003) said : 		#6

Thanks nhasian, that solved my question.