It has an ntfs filesystem on it, as it arrived, i plugged it into the computer (running ubuntu edgy eft) but it doesn't see it. ubuntu does this thing of creating and destroying the mount points and usb device nodes as it detects them so i am not sure where to go from here. i unplugged my other usb devices so i didn't do anything to anything else (if you see what i mean), and some devices have now gone... here:
before:
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root@harvey:~# ls /dev/sd*
/dev/sdb /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdc2
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root@harvey:/media# ls /dev/sd*
ls: /dev/sd*: No such file or directory
Okay, i've vaugued out, but back to the plot: i want this device to be usable by winNT and linux operating systems, though linux is my main priority. i am still swithering about whether to format it to fat32 but if there's some journaling FS that winNT and linux can both do then that's for me. I recently heard NTFS support is now stable for linux. is it? i don't mean "okay", i mean" stable". you know what i could do is, there's a program for windows that allows you to open ext2 filesystems, eh? i could make an ext2/3 filesystem on the largest part of the disk and have a tiny fat32 filesystem containing the ext2 program. then when i visit someone i can install the program off the fat32 part and then i would be able to see the rest of the drive. okay, yes, that's what i want right enough.
But to do this, i need to be able to fdisk and mkfs this drive. is this easy? is it possible? how? i hate saying things like this, but in windows, all i would need to do is plug it in and it'd be detected, given a drive letter etc etc. What's the equivalent in linux? this seems like a very basic issue, and yet searching in google turns up many unrelated and unfortunately unhelpful results. maybe i am just not searching using the right terminology.
Can anybody advise please?