USB booting :: Formatting HD after penboot

I am trying to partition, format and use a hard drive on my pen drive booted system.

A search of "format AND hard drive" or "format AND hd" yeilds no results.

How should I proceed?

first you must know which device actually is your (first/only) harddisk.

most computers today should contain a parallel ata or 'compatible mode' serial ata harddisk - this will be accessible as '/dev/hda'. scsi harddisks or sata/ahci mode serial ata harddisks sould be accessible as '/dev/sda'. your pen drive will be accessible under '/dev/sda' in the former or '/dev/sdb' in the latter case.

second you need to know that the normal 'formatting' of a harddisk under windows means 'making a file system' under linux. i.e. if you decide to create a new 'ext3' filesystem on your first p-ata harddisk enter

'mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda'

in a root shell. 'ext2' and 'minix' filesystems are natively supported by dsl too. others may be available through dsl extensions.

The drive I'm using is from another computer that has linux installed. It shows up as hda in Emelfm it has /hda1 and /hda3. I think the invisible swap partition is hda2.

What I would like to do is:

1. run the equivalent of dos fdisk command to re-partition the drive.

2. format the drive

or

just empty and reformat the existing partitions.

1. open a root shell
2. use 'fdisk /dev/hda' (text) or 'cfdisk /dev/hda' (menu) to repartition the drive and create one or more new partitions
3. make the desired filesystems i.e. 'mkfs.ext2 /dev/hda1' or 'mkswap /dev/hda3' or 'mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda5'

Thanks ~thc
That's what I was looking for

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