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[Digger]

Yeah yeah yeah, new user here, be gentle...

I'm looking for a program to format and mount (persistant) an external USB hard drive that was given to me. It's currently formatted as NTFS, and I want to make it a dedicated Linux drive (data storage on my modest p3 laptop) and so far, using VL light, I've not found anything built in, and doing it the command line way is rather tedious (what can I say, ex-BeOS user here, addicted to a GUI)

Thanks

[nightflier]

Launch gslapt. Search for, and install gparted. It is all point and click.

[Digger]

Heh, late last night I discovered VSAM can do this (sort of) but although I've mounted and formatted the external drive properly, I only have read/write access to it under 'root' user. Even if I give permissions to my normal log in, I have read, but not write access, this is frustrating, any suggestions?

[Daniel]

As root, go to and right-click on the external drive. Choose properties, then permissions. There should be some checkboxes that you can check to enable read/write/execute access for "others".

[Digger]

Hi Daniel-

I did that, but it doesn't seem to 'stick' when I log in as me. There are options in that page for 'owner' (currently 'root') and 'groups' (also 'root') I figured what the heck, check them all (including 'set uid' and 'gid' and 'sticky') and although that gives me read access, no write access.

Slightly frustrating...still, hopeful for a solution

[nightflier]

Do you use vl-hot for removable drives (as in, you get a desktop icon when it is plugged in)?

[Digger]

That's correct, vl-hot on the desktop

[haywire]

I also vote for gparted. Also, there is an iso available to boot directly to gparted as well.

I use this all the time to wipe and reformat drives on computers I get from other people, or from the trash. You can use it to format for  linux or for windows, dos, whatever os you want.

On your own desktop, it works nicely too...

Steven

[The Headacher]

This should be possible with vasm / vasmcc... (installed by default!) Of course, it doesn't look as pretty as gparted, but if all you want is a single partition I think it's easy enough.

VasmCC -> Filesystem -> Partition