[CentOS] Help setting up USB drive

Fri May 29 13:36:10 UTC 2009
Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>

At Thu, 28 May 2009 19:24:25 -0400 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> I have my 640GB USB drive connected to a CentOS 5 server and using
> fdisk, it seems to show a partition of the correct size, /dev/sdd1, but
> after mounting, the drive shows only 244M size. Does the message
> received when running fdisk below mean I should reformat this drive, I

No, fdisk is giving you a message that only really relates to BIOSs and
O/Ss that are now long obsolete.  Unless your machine is 1980's or early
1990's vintage, you can safely ignore that message.

> can't seemed to figure out how to do that with fdisk. Can someone tell
> me how to reformat, if needed? The drive is empty, I formatted a while
> back on a Debian machine....

How long back (?).

Either the version of mkfs.ext3 was an old and limited version (not able
to handle such a large drive) OR you did something strange with dd.

You could try reformatting it with the current version of mkfs.ext3 on
your CentOS 5 system:

# umount /home/usb
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdd1

This *should* format the whole partition.

> 
> [root at vhost1 ~]# /sbin/fdisk /dev/sdd
> 
> The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 77825.
> There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
> and could in certain setups cause problems with:
> 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
> 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
>    (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
> 
> Command (m for help): p
> 
> Disk /dev/sdd: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sdd1               1       77825   625129281   83  Linux
> 
> Command (m for help): q
> 
> [root at vhost1 ~]# mount -t ext3 /dev/sdd1 /home/usb
> [root at vhost1 ~]# df -h|grep usb
> /dev/sdd1             244M  6.1M  225M   3% /home/usb
> [root at vhost1 ~]# ls -lah /home/usb
> total 21K
> drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 1.0K May 10 14:38 .
> drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4.0K May  9 23:26 ..
> drwx------ 2 root root  12K May 10 14:38 lost+found
> [root at vhost1 ~]# du -d 1 -h /home/usb
> du: invalid option -- d
> Try `du --help' for more information.
> [root at vhost1 ~]# du -h /home/usb
> 12K	/home/usb/lost+found
> 13K	/home/usb
> 

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933
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