Preparing a Disk for OpenSlug

I got a new 250GB USB drive today, and plugged in a hub into my NSLU2, and connected this up. These are the commands I needed to execute to get it all set up (it was an NTFS formatted disk initially).

First of all, use dmesg to ensure the disk has been recognised and mounted. I had to change from my USB2.0 hub to a USB1.0 hub. I’ll get a new 2.0 hub in the next few days to try that out. Apparently some of them don’t work.

From dmesg, the hub has been recognised:

usb 2-1.1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 3 usb 2-1.1: not running at top speed; connect to a high speed hub

The new disk has been mounted as an NTFS (dirty) disk:

NTFS volume version 3.1. NTFS-fs error (device sdc1): load_system_files(): $LogFile is not clean. Mounting read-only. Mount in Windows.

Things to note: * the device name in this case is /dev/sdc1. This is the third USB device in my chain. * /dev/sda(1,2,3) are the root, swap and user partitions on the boot disk, * /dev/sdb1 is the first 250GB drive I bought.

nslu2:~ root$ umount /media/sdc1/
nslu2:~ root$ fdisk /dev/sdc1/

Then you will need to delete the partition (d), and create a new one (n). (p): Primary partition, #1, accept default start and end blocks.

Then use (w) to write the partition out to disk.

nslu2:~ root$ reboot

Wait for the machine to reboot fully.

nslu2:~ root$ umount /media/sdc1/ 
nslu2:~ root$ mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdc1 mke2fs 1.38 (30-Jun-2005) ...

It takes a while to process. Worthwhile rebooting after this just to be sure.

All done.