how to format my external drive?

[Clinton MacDonald]

Edith and fellow Yellow Dog Newbies:

On Thursday, October 2, 2003, at 11:16  AM, Edith Frost wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 10:38, Clinton MacDonald wrote:
>>>> [...] you can play with the beta extension for Mac OS X that allows 
>>>> mounting of the ext2 (Linux) filesystem:
>>>>
>>>> <https://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/>
>
> Well, I just tried it and it works like magic!!!!! I installed it and 
> rebooted to OSX, and when it came back up it not only mounted my 
> external drive, but my Linux partition as well. I could browse the 
> MP3s and drag them to the OSX desktop with no problem. I didn't want 
> to risk writing to the disk from there so I haven't tried that, but 
> I'm so pleased to be able to read the drive from OSX without any 
> monkey business. Yippeeee!!!

Well, I just downloaded and installed the drivers myself, and Edith's 
report is entirely accurate -- it works like magic!

For background, I finally installed Mac OS X on my "experimental" 
Wallstreet PowerBook G3 (266 MHz, 256 MB RAM, 25-GB hard drive). I can 
report that Mac OS X runs passably well on this machine, though 
switching between applications is dog slow. However, individual 
applications (including Microsoft Word, a notorious CPU hog) run 
without incident in mac OS X.

The Wallstreet hard drive is divided like so: 7.5 GB Mac OS 9/X 
partition (HFS+), 1.0 GB "transfer" partition (HFS), ~15 GB Yellow Dog 
Linux partition (ext3), and some small swap partition that I don't 
remember. I chose to install the ext2fsx package in order to see the 
Linux partitions and so that I could see Zip disks that are formatted 
with ext2. The package installs smoothly, then asks for a reboot. After 
reboot, I saw three drive icons, the two Mac partitions an a third 
called "UNTITLED." UNTITLED contains all my Linux directories (/bin, 
/boot, /dev, /etc, etc.). The only issue I have is that I do not have 
privileges to access any of the user folders in my /home directory -- I 
might need to login as root from the Terminal to do that. Still, its 
not a bad deal.

Hmmm.... Now that I can see my Linux partition, what sorts of nefarious 
mischief I can perform there. :-) My first experiment (from the 
Terminal app in Mac OS X):

[Clints-Wallstreet:~] clint% sudo ls /Volumes/UNTITLED/home/clint
.AbiSuite   .gimp-1.2   .nautilus ...

Success!

Best wishes,
Clint

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