[CentOS] External USB Drive partitioning and formatting

[Sean Carolan]

> /dev/sdb1            976760032     97808 976662224   1% /mnt/usbdrive
>
> I am thinking of having three partitions instead of just one whole big 1 TB
> thing, and then format all three partitions in ext3. I tried doing
> fdisk, but cylinders are always confusing for me. Is there any GUI
> tool that could help me achieve this as I am newbie to Linux and not
> very confident with commands. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Don't be afraid of fdisk, it's really an easy tool to use.  From your
output above it's quite apparent that your USB drive is located at
/dev/sdb.  First unmount your drive (umount /dev/sdb1) and then run
this command as root:

fdisk /dev/sdb

Then hit "d" to blow away that big vfat partition.  Then you hit "n"
to create a new partition.  You don't have to know anything about
cylinders, as fdisk will allow you to specify your partition sizes in
megabytes.  Create your three partitions, hit the 'w' key to write out
the new partition table and you're almost done.  Once the partition
table is written you can format your shares like this:

mkfs -text3 /dev/sdb1
mkfs -text3 /dev/sdb2
mkfs -text3 /dev/sdb3

Easy.