[Herefordshire] Formatting ext hdd

[Mark Broadbent]

Hello,

Malcolm Herbert wrote:
> in terms of installing onto USB and/or ieee1394 firewire drivers this
> can be tricky with some distro's (Fedora included)

I don't believe Firewire is officially supported in Fedora at the moment
but it can (insert big disclaimer here...) work.

> However I use both types of drives for work from my laptop, after the
> install on the local disk and apart for the usual screw up when said
> external drive controller breaks, they have performed consistently well
> and reliably. 
> 
> One thing to note; ReiserFS is ok, until it breaks. Unlike ext3 it is
> very difficult to recover from failures. Also, worth avoiding using LVM
> or LVM2 on external drives. 

I have to say I've run reiserfs for years without any problems.  It
depends how you view breaking.  Reiserfs will maintain filesystem
integrity through most types of corruption, what it won't do (unlike to
default ext3 mode of operation) is guarantee the data in a half-written
file when the power was killed will remain.  Why do this? Speed,
reiserfs is generally much faster than ext3.

Also why is LVM bad on external disks?

Thanks
Mark

> Malcolm
> 
> On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 00:29, EdwardFW at aol.com wrote:
> 
>>I have come across the claim that using Linux partitioning tools to
>>format external hard drives is likely to cause problems.
>>
>>My SUSE 9.2 installation was wrecked when I connected an external
>>firewire hard drive. (Then, perhaps because of my lack of ability,
>>reiserfsck could not sort it out.) Thus I am cautious.
>>
>>Anyone have relevant experience that supports or contradicts? Any
>>recommendations? I don't plan to alter external hard drives a lot but
>>I want to be able to.
>>
>>Apart from SUSE I am going to get Kubuntu 4.04, and I have Knoppix
>>live. I doubt that there is a floppy image that will reach USB and /
>>or Firewire??
>>
>>I have an adaptor to connect 2.5 laptop drives to 3.5 inch drive
>>cables and don't mind messing about if necessary so if it is best to
>>connect to the internal IDE on some box I will. 
>>
>>I hope to be at the next meeting if anyone would prefer to respond
>>there.
>>
>>Regards, Edward Fowler-Wright
>>
>>
>>
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