how to format my external drive?

[Clinton MacDonald]

Richard:

On Sunday, November 2, 2003, at 03:46  PM, Richard.Gill@math.uu.nl 
wrote:
> I also experienced the kernel panick recently with ext2fs. If your mac 
> os x crashes (which of course almost never happens, but still...)

Actually, I have had two unattended kernel panics since The Incident. 
And, you're right: it seems weird to have Mac OS X be anything but rock 
stable. Fortunately, this is on my "beater" Wallstreet PowerBook, and I 
didn't have any data on it, yet.

<Off-topic>
I would like to see the Wallstreet in service eventually, however. 
There are too many cool add-ons for the drive bay (a second battery, 
Zip drive, CD-ROM, etc.) not to want to use it. With two batteries in 
the bays, the stated unplugged life in OS X is around five hours 
(versus 3 hours for my TiBook). Shucks, the Wallstreet may finally be 
my mythical "perfect" writing machine.
</Off-topic>

> [...] then your linux partition has not been cleanly unmounted. You 
> reboot mac osx and after a terribly long wait get a message that the 
> linux partition can't be mounted because it is not in order. Reboot 
> into yellowdog linux, fsck is invoked during startup to check the 
> partition.

I may do that. Perhaps stupidly, I tried to fsck the YDL partition from 
OS X's single user mode (How, you might ask? "# /sbin/fsck_ext2 -y 
/dev/disk0s11"; Why? Don't ask :-) ). Mac OS X's fsck_ext2 discovered 
many error that it valiantly tried to fix. After the fourth run through 
with no improvement, I gave up. I do not know that YDL's fsck and Mac 
OS X's are even compatible. I have not yet rebooted into Yellow Dog 
Linux, but I would not be surprised if I mangled things beyond repair. 
I'll try to remember to report to the list on my findings, but I am 
considering a total "nuke-and-pave" (reformat the drive and reinstall 
everything from scratch) for both OS X and Yellow Dog Linux on the 
Wallstreet. This will be as much for the learning experience as to fix 
my problems with ext2fs.

> Then there should be no bad consequences of mac crashing (not that it 
> ever does, but...)

;-)

Best wishes,
Clint

-- 
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint DOT macdonald AT sbcglobal DOT 
net>