<html><body>Hi All<br /><br />I've acquired a 3 1/2" 160GB e-SATA hard drive in an external USB case that I want to use to back up my files. I need to give it a meaningful volume name to distinguish it from my other external devices and I've searched and found some of the commands I need. But I'm stuck on steps 4, 5 and 6 below. Please could someone help me out? My preference is always for CLI over graphical as I can save the commands for future use.<br /><br />---------------------------------------------------------<br />1. Discover the device name allocated to the external hdd<br />and find out how many partitions it has<br />---------------------------------------------------------<br />BEFORE attaching external hdd:<br />$ ls -l /dev/sd*<br />Now attach external hdd and re-run above command. Look for the added line.<br /><br />RESULT:<br />brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 80 2011-02-19 23:45 /dev/sdf<br />brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 81 2011-02-19 23:45 /dev/sdf1<br /><br />---------------------------------------------------------<br />2. Discover the size of the external hard drive partition<br />---------------------------------------------------------<br /># df /dev/sdf1<br />(If multiple partitions, run $ df /dev/sdf*)<br /><br />RESULT:<br />Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on<br />/dev/sdf1 150G 91M 149G 1% /media/New Volume<br /><br />---------------------------------------------------------------------<br />3. Assign Dos type device name to the external hdd prior to using mlabel<br />---------------------------------------------------------------------<br /># cat /etc/mtools.conf<br /># echo -e "\ndrive x: file=\"/dev/sdf1\"" >> /etc/mtools.conf<br /><br />---------------------------------------------------<br />4. Display existing volume name of the external hdd<br />---------------------------------------------------<br /># mlabel ????????<br />I want to know how to view the label first.<br />I'm nervous at this point as I don't want to corrupt the drive.<br /><br />---------------------------------------------<br />5. Give the external hard drive a volume name<br />---------------------------------------------<br />mlabel or e2label or tune2fs are mentioned on this link:<br />http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/how-to-change-volume-label-of-the-usb-drives-594875/<br />But the instructions aren't precise enough - I don't want to corrupt the disk!<br /><br />------------------------------------------------------------------<br />6. Partition the external hdd into 3 partitions of 50GB each<br />Format one for a Windows file system and the others for Linux only<br />------------------------------------------------------------------<br />I also need help here! This is my first external device large enough to benefit from
partitioning (I've only ever partitioned during OS installation until
now).<br /><br /><br />
Best Regards,<br />Fay<br />East Grinstead Linux User Group<br />www.eglug.org.uk<br /><br /><br /></body></html>