Format one hard drive into NTFS on my linux machine

sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

You can now run:

gksudo gparted

and format the partition.

You might need to install gparted first, it's not always installed as standard It's on the LiveCd but not a regular install i think. So try

sudo apt-get install gparted

or else go to the top taskbar and click on

System - Administration - Synaptic Package Manager

it asks for your normal user password, not your SuperUser/Root one. Use either seach tool (my favourite is the "Search" button) to look for "gparted". Note that things already installed on your system are marked by a green splodge, to install something new just right-click and choose "install". First time in Synaptic it might be worth clicking on "Mark all updates" before clicking "Apply". For some reason Synaptic picks up more updates than the normal update manager sometimes. Apt-get gets them all of course. I prefer using Synaptic to using the command-line tool, there's also another gui at the bottom of the "Applications" menu but they all use the same repositories and same database and all ultimately use 'apt-get' but i find the gui's present the info in a more pleasing way and i find it easier to search for stuff i don't already know the name of. Now you can either run gparted from the command-line as ActionParsnip showed or else you could run it from

System - Administration - Partition Editor

Note that if you're using Kubuntu rather than Ubuntu then the prefered Partition Editor is QtPartEd instead of GPartEd but as both look almost identical and use the same commnd-line tool, surprisingly called "parted". Note that installing a Kde package inside Ubuntu or a gnome package inside Kubuntu will only have the unfortunate effect of poulling in a whole load of extra programs (we call them dependencies) to make the program work and this isn't a problem unless you have only a very small drive space. At 1 Tb there's nothing to worry about.

When you're using Gparted or Qtparted you'll see that it only appears to show the drive that Ubuntu is running from. To switch to the other drive go up to the button on the top right-hand corner that says something like "/dev/sda1 1Tb media" and clicking on it you'll see that it's really a drop-down list of all the drives gparted can reformat/repartition etc. Note that you can even create an ntfs partition on the same drive as Ubuntu if you just resize the Ubuntu partition to allow the new one some room. Early Windows such as Win95 and maybe Win98 might get confused but Xp and later and probably Win98 too should be able to see the ntfs partition quite easily, even though it'll ignore the linux partitions on the same drive! That's Windows snobbery for you ;) heheheh

Good luck with this, take care!
Regard from Tom :)

Thanks guys!

I now have another question. I am trying to share the NTFS drive that is on my linux box on the rest of my network so I can save files to it. Is there anyway I can share the whole drive or do I need to create a folder on the drive?

Tricky

I don't really know but i imagine you could share the entire partition. If i was doing it i would be tempted to cheat and put one big folder on it and then share that folder - just because sharing folders is easy and i don't know how to share partitions yet. Also it'd mean i could put some non-shared stuff on there if i ever needed to without stuffing everything else up. I like to keep things flexible where possible.

Err, did you want to make this an ntfs partition just so that machines over the network that run Windows could read it? lol, sorry buddy i wish we had known that in advance becaus we could have saved you the bother. You can share any folder that's on an ext3 or anything and the Windows machines will be able to see them without really having a clue that they aren't on an ntfs. The only reason you'd need ntfs is for when you dual-boot the local machine into Windows. On my house network we have one machine always on Windows (Dave's) and one always on linux, usually Ubuntu (mine) and the server keeps changing between being a linux server to being a Windows server (Rob's) but it all makes no difference. I've been able to save stuff onto Dave's machine and he's played movies off mine and written stuff onto my machine. The only issue is i have to remember to write using Microsquish formats, such as avi rather than ogg, doc instead of odt and txt instead of not bothering with a file extension to indicate format ;)

It is wise to have data stored separately to the main OS and having shared folders on yet another partition seems wise. Usually i try to avoid partitioning things up too much because it reduces flexibility for me but in these cases i think it's wise.

Ntfs, even tho it's journalised, still seems to be quite flaky and seems to suffer from random data loss at times whereas ext3 is much more robust. I'm not sure but wouldn't ntfs suffer from fragmentation and need greater maintenance or does the style of writing data belong to the OS rather than the file-system in use on a partition? I think an ext3 partition would be safer from viruses too.

I doubt you'll find any formats in Windows that can't be read by linux. I know of 1 but it's a very weird business tool that is a bit obscure and not very useful. Even then those files can be stored on an ext3 (or ext4) quite happily without causing any fuss.

It's quite weird because usually you really have to go out of your way to make sure Windows is going to be ok and has everything set up in the only way it can handle but in this case the network sharing mechanism for Windows was written by linux/unix people and so it's quite flexible.

Good luck with this
Regards from
Tom :)

Look into samba, make sure the ntfs drive gets mounted user writable or you will have issues.