What filesystem should I use on my new USB 2.0 external hard drive? It'll mostly stay attached to an Ubuntu box and be used to store large video files for streaming to playback devices on my network, but I'd also like to be able to take it to a friend's house and plug it into whatever computer they happen to have. [more inside]
posted by contraption on May 2, 2009 - 12 answers

Had a motherboard failure and it affected the hard drive. Big partition is missing and the drive is displayed as much smaller than it actually is. I don't care about the data, but I'd like to use the hard drive again at its normal capacity. [more inside]
posted by Mayor Curley on Oct 2, 2008 - 3 answers

I think I'm finally switching to Ubuntu on my main machine. I have two 160GB external drives, currently both with NTFS, currently mirrored (by software, not a RAID). With what and how should I format/use these guys? [more inside]
posted by tmcw on Mar 14, 2008 - 8 answers

I would like to recover data from two SATA hard drives that were once part of a single logical partition under Linux [more inside]
posted by KirTakat on Mar 8, 2008 - 2 answers

How do I transfer my current Ubuntu system to a new, larger hard drive? [more inside]
posted by bonecrusher on Aug 21, 2007 - 10 answers

How can I wipe a hard drive if I can't boot from CD and there is no floppy drive? We want to install winXP on a machine with Ubuntu (eventual dual-boot). [more inside]
posted by billtron on Jan 28, 2007 - 14 answers

I have a SATA hard drive with all my data (yeah, I was just about to implement a backup scheme with rsync...), and my Ubuntu installation shit the bed. I'm back up, but the partition table on that drive is kablooey. It is formated ext3, and I have little reason to suspect that the data is not there. Are there any good tools for restoring a partition table on ext3, or can this be done natively? Gparted shows the file system marked as ext3, but with a warning about not being able to open dumpe2fs. [more inside]
posted by adampsyche on Dec 12, 2006 - 5 answers

What's the most sensible way to add redundant storage to an existing Linux system using LVM? [more inside]
posted by odinsdream on Oct 19, 2006 - 7 answers

LinuxN00bFilter: Linux and/or dual boot from external USB HD (not pen/flash drive, but a real hard drive) -- how? [more inside]
posted by treepour on Oct 1, 2006 - 5 answers

Debian won't find my hard drive! Please help! I have details so there's [more inside]
posted by tdreyer1 on Jul 12, 2006 - 14 answers

How do I format a Linux'd harddrive with XP? [more inside]
posted by Satapher on Jun 14, 2006 - 7 answers

My USB2 hard drive will only stay mounted if I keep accessing it. If I don't, within 5 hours or fewer, I can't access files on the drive or even do a directory listing. I can then unmount the HD, power cycle it, and it will mount again as if nothing had happened. If I keep accessing the disk, say by continuously playing an MP3 mix on it, the disk acts completely normal: uptime now (with MP3s playing) is something like 20 hours without the shadow of a problem. [more inside]
posted by rwhe on Apr 18, 2006 - 12 answers