On 06-Feb-06, you wrote: > dooger watts wrote: > >> Just got my new external hd case from newegg, and I'm having trouble >> getting the ide drive to format. >> >> Seems like I recall vague mention of having to format the drive BEFORE >> installing it in the external enclosure, but, as there was no mention of >> this in the admittedly skimpy instructions that came with the box, I >> thought I'd try to do it via usb. >> >> Any thoughts on this? > > If the USB interface works at all, it ought to be happy to format the > disk. At the IDE and USB level, the MBR, partition tables, and > filesystem superblocks are just sectors on the disk, and don't > get any special treatment. > > What kind of errors are you getting? What's in your dmesg output?
Just kept nearly finishing the format, then timing out with the error message "windoze can't format this drive." Tried various jumper settings and Fat as well as Fat32, but no luck. It's a 40-gig seacrate. Decided to try taking it out of the enclosure and plugging it into an ole P3 in the garage. It formatted! One thing that was different, from my attempts to format it via USB while it was in its external enclosure: I formated it NTFS. Had heard that I should format FAT or FAT32, so that's what I'd been trying to do--though none of my other disks are formatted so. 'Cept maybe floppies. Now it's back in its box (a SYBA; I've had good luck with their components), and it seems to work fine--if a tad slow. A 1-gig ghost file is taking eighteen minutes to copy to the external drive. (Thought I was gonna get usb2 speeds out of this thing). Oh well. Still feels good to be able to backup my backups. Thanx, y'all for your suggestions, M _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
