Preparing External USB Hard Drive...

[tycopolis]

Hello everyone... I recently had problems uprading my Ubuntu, and now I need to recover some things. Here's a list of what I need to recover:

1. Thunderbird email
2. Firefox bookmarks
3. Directories / Folders that have ALL of my data in them.

I have a 40GB Hard Drive that I took out of an old machine. I put the Hard Drive into a USB HDD Enclosure. I connected the usb cable to my laptop and then booted using knoppix 4.0. I ran QTparted and it seems that the drive has 3 Partitions. Here's how it is listed in QTparted:

01 /UNIONFS/dev/sdb1 fat16 54.88MB

02 /UNIONFS/dev/sdb2 ntfs Active 37.20GB

03 /UNIONFS/dev/sdb-1 free 1.03GB

Now for my ?'s.

1. Can I just copy my data to the External drive without doing any partitioning or formatting? Once my Ubuntu is back up and running, will I be able to just simply copy them back?

2. How can I delete everything on this External drive, and use it like a regular "thumb / flash" drive?

Thanks for all your help...

[Harry Kuhman]

1. Can I just copy my data to the External drive without doing any partitioning or formatting? Once my Ubuntu is back up and running, will I be able to just simply copy them back?

You should be able to copy files to the FAT partition just fine. Make sure that you mount it as read/write, not the default read-only. I would caution against using the NTFS partition. If you need more space than the FAT partition provides and you don't need what's currently on the NTFS partition, considering repartitioning it and formating it as FAT also.

2. How can I delete everything on this External drive, and use it like a regular "thumb / flash" drive?

This is just a partitioning and formatting question. Use whatever partitioning tool that you are comfortable with (for me that's Ranish but I think I'm in a manority there). Figure out how you want the drive partitioned, make the partitions, format them (some tools like Ranish do this in the partition operation, other like Microsoft require a seperate format step). I would suggest saving this for later, recover your data first.

[tycopolis]

Thanks Harry for the quick reply. I need the space that's on the ntfs partition. I guess what I really need is instructions on how to completely "erase/slick" this External drive using the software provided by knoppix 4.0. I would make it just 1 large partition for storage. Should that partition be FAT,EXT3? Should I just make it a FAT32?

[tycopolis]

Ok... QTparted worked.... ... I right clicked on the ntfs partition and chose "Erase & Format" It then gave me the option to make it FAT32, and I did. I thought that it would take it some time to complete, but it was done in like 2 seconds. What a great piece of software!!! Thanks again Harry for helping me. G-d bless...