[CentOS] mounting & partitioning Seagate FreeAgent external HD

Thu Jan 3 17:34:46 UTC 2008
Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 at duke.edu>

On Thu, 3 Jan 2008 at 10:28am, Tim McGeary wrote

> Actually, your first email made me double check this to see if I was missing 
> something and I was (or maybe it really wasn't there initially).  So what I 
> see now is:
>
> Disk /dev/sda: 750.1 GB, 750156374016 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
>
>   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sda1             1     91201 732572001    7  HPFS/NTFS
>
> This is definitely the drive.  So when I try to use Webmin to mount and 
> partition device /dev/sda (and also tried /dev/sda2) as a New Linux Native 
> Filesystem (ext3), I get the error of:
>
> Failed to save mount : Mount failed :
> mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda,
>       or too many mounted file systems
>
> So I'm guessing I'm using the wrong file system type.  What should I use 
> instead of ext3?

The drive is formatted NTFS, which is pretty much useless under Linux. 
Assuming you intend to only use this drive in Linux, you simply need to 
reformat the drive.

mke2fs -j /dev/sda1
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/point

Obviously, substitute your desired mount point for "/mnt/point".

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
UCSF