Mr. Geek wrote:
Kaj; I think Anne has the right idea. I have several clients using
external USB drives instead of other types of backup drives/media. Many
of them came partitioned and pre-formatted as FAT32, but Diskdrake made
fast work of it.
One thing you should consider though, is that it helps sometimes to
delete the mount-point folder right after you unmount the drive and
before you attempt to delete the FAT32 partition.
Your problem may have something to do with that. If not, then this will
make sure that drive access and permissions are updated at the least.
If necessary, go to the harddrive manufacturer's website and download
their diagnostics tools. Some like Maxtor have a bootable ISO image you
can download and use to reformat the drive back to factory standards.
Others have the same type of tools which can be run from a bootable
floppy diskette.
Worst-case, you can remove the hard drive from it's USB case and
temporarily connect it as a slave drive on your Linux box. Once
Diskdrake sees the drive you can proceed normally and delete and create
new partitions and re-format the drive the way you prefer.
Your problem might also be that the circuitry in the USB box itself may
have either a hardware or software 'Lock' system. Check your owners
manual for the USB box to see if it does. Once more possibility is that
the controller chip in the USB case does not support Linux, but I find
that highly unlikely.
IN all cases, you'll have to unmount the drive from diskdrake to begin
the process, so keep that in mind.
One problem you run into with the tools from the drive manfacturer is
that most of them do not enable USB support, so they will not even see
the drive. This will hopefully change as externel USB and Firewire
drives become more popular, but for now, you just about have to create a
special boot disk if you want to work on something other then a IDE of
SCSI drive. (OpenDOS has some nice boot disks...)
Mikkel
--
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for you are crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
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