Re: [tlug] [OT?]A Hard Drive Question

[tlug@example.com]

On Friday 15 June 2007 18:26:17 burlingk@example.com wrote:
> Has anyone ever formatted an external USB hard drive with anything other
> than FAT32?  Is it possible to format one using EXT3 or similar?  If so,
> are there any benefits to doing so?

Yes, you can format the drive with any filesystem that you want.  I have used 
ext2 before, and it worked great.  I didn't use ext3 just because I didn't 
want to use a journaled filesystem on removable media.  Here are some of the 
benefits:
* Linux filesystems will maintain your file/directory permissions (so every 
file on the drive does not appear executable, for example)
* you can use the drive as a home directory when booting Knoppix or other 
LiveMedia
* you can use an encrypted filesystem to protect your data on a device that is 
easily lost or stolen
* you can use soft links when organzing the data on the drive

I have also experimented with partitioning USB drives to use more than one 
partition.  One idea was to make a small FAT32 partition as well as a second 
ext2 partition.  This could be useful in case you ever need to use it on a 
non-Linux machine but still want to have the benefits of a Linux fs.  
Alternately, the FAT32 partition could be used as a decoy, and Windows users 
would never know that a second, encrypted filesystem exists on the drive.  My 
partitioned drives worked perfectly on my (Gentoo) box, but unfortunately 
they had problems on other machines, so I gave up on that idea.

> I know that at the very least, it would make the drive harder to use
> with Windows. :P

If you want to play around with Windows people, try this: use a hex editor to 
edit the FAT tables of a FAT32 formated USB drive.  It is easy to make a 
drive appear to have an infinite number of directories. &grin;

Cheers, Travis