how to change the filetype of a external hdd to linux. - with GParted?

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1

hello dear OpenSuse Experts,

how to change the filetype of a external hdd to linux. Thats the question of the day for me.

Formatting a USB external hard drive, could be a very easy task when done with proper tools. which one should i use? Gparted!?

Note - it seems to have data-loss when saving and doing backups on the default format.

Look forward to hear from you!

**and now: **May you enjoy the time of the holidays with your nearest and dearest, family, the friends and those who love you and care for you.
May this New Year give you the courage to do triumph all your projects.

I wish you a Happy New Year to every one of you, and a wonderful year 2016!

Regards dilbertone

**Background: - see this thread:
**

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/508490-loss-of-data-if-trying-to-backup-with-dolphin-commandline-is-the-way-to-go!

currently doing a backup of my notebook
and doing so i have made some interesting experiences
if i copy the directory - home/my_name from hdd to external drive

  • with dolphin i get a loss of data rangning form 10 to 15 GB - in other words up to 15 percent
    **
    questions**:

a- is it more appropiate to do this job with commaandline?
b- where does this loss of data come from
c- can i make sure that i have no loss - with any version / method

  • i would prefer to go the command line way

any ideas

**Nrickert **recommended:
It would never have occurred to me, to use Dolphin for a backup. Still, it should work if you remember to include all of the hidden file (files whose name begins with “.”.
I would normally use the command line:

cd destination-directory

( cd source-directory && tar cf - . ) | tar xpf -

**Tomaskom **said:

It might be useful to find out what kind of files got omitted - it might be hidden files (especially if you entered the home folder and selected all, then copied), it might be something about permissions of some files. Also as others said: how did you determine that files are missing? If you used different file browser, it might have told you once GB and once GiB (which would be ~7% difference).
You can also determine the size from command line:

du -hs /folder/

If this output differs, you really have something missing.

And finally, if you were backing up to a removable harddrive/flash drive and removed it after dolphin finished the operation but before the data from cache got really written, that might be another potential source of the problem. You can always ensure that all data got written by using the command sync and waiting for it to return.

2

A disk (or disk partition) has no “file type”.

When you mean: how to partition a disk and how to create file system(s) on it’s partition(s), why not use YaST > System > Partitioning?

3

hello dear hcvv

first of all - many many thanks for the quick reply - youre right!

i want to formate a external hard drive with linux-file-system - the question is: how to do that?

My** assumtions: **- if the external hard drive is foramtted with MS file system we will lose the permission info and we may have problems restoring it correctly.

**but futhermore: **there are some important things - i want to avoid the data loss that i get with restoring linux-system on a external hdd that does not
have filesystems like ext 2 or ext 3 or ext 4

so here we can talk about methods to do a formating:

so i want to formate the external hdd with linux. can i do that with gparted? Guess so!
We can do this also with gparted. we can do this by using using GParted. GParted is a free utility designed to partition and format drives in a wide variety of filesystems, some of which include, ext2, ext3, ext4, NTFS, fat32, fat16, etc.

the other way is doing it with the commandline


dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/Gerät bs=65535

this creats zero on the whole hdd

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

well someone may argue that dd is not a good way:

Some further assumptions: one might say that dd is not a formatting tool? - and using it is potentially dangerous.

we have two options for wiping away the existing partitions on the external drive and creating a new one.

  • we can use GParted (which has a graphical interface) to delete all the existing partitions off the external hard disk then
  • create a new one, or we can do it from the command line with /sbin/fdisk, but we do exactly the same thing here
  • we delete all the existing partitions and create one in the right format (type 82, iirc, for ext2/3/4).
  • fdisk is menu driven and pretty intuitive.

to talk about GParted - it has two advantages over fdisk:

  1. We can clearly see which disk we re updating in the graphical tool
  2. It’ll do the final formatting, which fdisk doesn’t do - it only creates and manipulates partitions.

to sume up: Either way the process is the same to create the partition,
and we can manually format our new partition with mkfs (which we have to do if we used fdisk).

so again - we can conclude: dd is a quite dangerous formatting tool - it is potentially dangerous.

… because if we get our “of” parameter wrong, we could wipe our internal hard drive! …And that would be worse - absolutely. The whole though of dd if=/dev/zero of=/anything is a bit uncomfortable. It’s a sure-fire way to wipe a partition table, for a start. Not something we can recommend to someone whl is new to the world of partition formatting. dd is not for the faint-hearted.

or like so with GParted

btw:; found some articles.,here:

So i will do some trials at the next days - hccv - do you think that i should go the Gparted-way!?

4

Just use yast it it very easy

5

I answered that above. And Gogalthorpe repeated it. What is the problem?

PS, I did not read your long story after what I quote here. The quote is a simple question, with a simple answer.

6

good Day dear googlathorp and hccv

okay. i will try to do the formatting with YAST´…

i will try out this method … Allways thought that the Commandline is the best tool to do things like that. But you seem to have convinced me.

7

If you understand the command line sure but it is plain simple to do thing through yast

8

Partition/Format with Yast partitioner, or with GParted, either will do just fine.