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 Deepwoods Software -- Download the Model Railroad System http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Binaries for Linux and MS-Windows heller at deepsoft.com -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ModelRailroadSystem/