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Operating Systems => Linux and UNIX => Topic started by: Stryker on 28 August 2002, 19:14

Title: formatting
Post by: Stryker on 28 August 2002, 19:14

I have 2 hard drives right now, I need to have the second one be a backup drive to the first one. I wrote a simple script to do it, but I need to partition and format the disk. How would I go about doing this?

Title: formatting
Post by: KernelPanic on 28 August 2002, 19:17

You want the formatting as part of the script?

Title: formatting
Post by: Stryker on 28 August 2002, 19:29

no, just a one time thing. like the format command in windows.

Title: formatting
Post by: KernelPanic on 28 August 2002, 19:38

First fdisk the disk and make your neccesary partitions using

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then do

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to format it.

Next you need to mount it using the 'mount' command. Or put it in mtab/fstab.

Title: formatting
Post by: Stryker on 28 August 2002, 19:48

Alright, I got it. mke2fs /dev/hdb1

Title: formatting
Post by: voidmain on 29 August 2002, 01:09

Rather than doing it all manually why don't you just configure the two drives as RAID 0 (mirrored drives). It's a whole lot easier to let the system do all the work.

Title: formatting
Post by: Stryker on 29 August 2002, 01:16

cause i dont know how, i'm new with partitioning in linux. i always took care of it on install, but i dont want to reinstall

Title: formatting
Post by: voidmain on 29 August 2002, 01:56

The nice thing about Linux RAID is you don't have to reinstall. As long as you haven't put anything on your second disk yet and it is at least as large as the partition you wish to mirror.  There is a RAID HOWTO on the Linux docomentation site if you are interested. But press on with the way you are doing it if that is good enough for you.

The nice thing about RAID0 is it will look like just one drive but it mirrors the data across two drives real time. If one drive fails you just press on like nothing happened but replace the failed drive when you can. But you may be doing backups for different reasons like if you mess up a file you can pull it from the backup. If that is the case then press on with what you are doing as that is not the purpose of RAID.