Help Needed With Formatting External Hard Drive To Ext4


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What should I use to format an external hard drive to the current(or best version of) ext4? I assume there aren't any windows-based programs that would allow me to do this, so if possible I'd like to do it from some live cd(or live dvd) with a desktop interface(I don't know how to deal with a command line interface).
 
Go to ubuntu.com and download the live cd :)
You can then either do it during during the install phase (and then choose to not install after doing the formatting), or once into the live desktop, launch Gpartitioned (I think that was it's name).
 
If you don't already run Linux/BSD, ext4 will probably be fairly useless. If you want to use it with a Linux system, you can use GParted under any Ubuntu system (including Live CDs).
 
I always end up using ext2 or 3 for some reason 4 i always end up with problems later on. Running Lubuntu here nice and fast system :)
 
NLS said:
or once into the live desktop, launch Gpartitioned (I think that was it's name).
It's GParted.
But yeah, get an Ubuntu Live CD, burn the ISO (InfraREcorder or whatever it's called is good for this), then boot from it, then do "boot without modifying" or whatever the first option is called, then use GParted to install ext3 or ext4.

I have all ext3 systems and if there's any data corruption in ext4, it won't be worth the speed gains, so I'd recommend ext3. I've been crashing a bit recently but ext3 always recovers fine.

And he's probably planning to use it on the Pandora, so that's good, because NTFS is pretty weird in Linux and although it's accessible, the permissions don't translate and I think they recommend not writing to it. And FAT is just terrible.
 
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Yeah, use ext2 on the disk with 128 byte inodes, so it's still readable by ext2ifs in Windows. Seems to work pretty well, at least for just dumping files in to, and it seems to inherit ownership from the parent directory when copying files over, so you don't have to worry about ownership blowing up.

If your partitioner doesn't include the option for inode size, it's "-I inode-size", for example:

Code:
mke2fs -I 128 /dev/whatever
 
Yes, I am intending to use the external hdd with my (future)Pandora as a storage vault to offload things from my single 32GB SDHC card(larger 500GB, 1&2TB, affordable SDXC cards are a long ways off... :( ), I'm just preparing things now so that when I finally have mine I'll be able to just dive in instead of wasting time with setting things up that could have been taken care of already. Thank you to all who reminded me of ubuntu(and informed me of the name of the formatting/partitioning program)...I don't know why I never seem to remember ubuntu(and its variants), whenever I've used Linux in the past I've just always used a different flavor. To lulzfish: thank you for bringing InfraREcorder to my attention, it looks like it will prove to be very useful. To kaprikawn & gunni: thank you for alerting me to those options, they would make for an even quicker and more straightforward solution to my issue.

I was mainly looking to ext4 because what I'd read seemed to indicate that data wouldn't fragment as much as with ext3&2(and other added features that, among other things) seemed to be aimed at making it better able to recover from a crash) and since I'm using a 1.5TB external(usb connected) hdd it might be a pain and a huge timesink to defragment on a regular basis. I obviously want to avoid data corruption and If ext4 is actually too flaky to to be reliable, ext3 might be the better choice. Still, if we as a community can further the discussion of what formats(present and future) would be the most reliable and best suited, not just to external hdd's, but for our SDHC cards and maybe SDXC as well(I'm probably going to go with ext2 on mine) I think it would be a big help to many and a smart idea in general.

Thank you again for the helpful replies.
from: Paul

ext4's delayed allocation=quite the double-edged sword?
 
I don't think you need to defrag ext filesystems, do you?
I haven't even defragmented Windows in years. It might just not be necessary on any system anymore.
 
lulzfish said:
I don't think you need to defrag ext filesystems, do you?
I haven't even defragmented Windows in years. It might just not be necessary on any system anymore.

I never found a defragging tool for linux or it`s native file systems, Does one actually exist ?.

Trooper
 
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As far as I know, no. :p

A bit more on-topic, I'm just using ext2 on my SD Cards, and ext3 on my external hard drive - I've never had any issues with either. :p
 
Ext2/3 don't fragment too badly. There is one for ext2, but not for 3 or 4. I'm not sure if ext has some kind of kernel-level active defragmentation, like Windows's background defragmenter.

Honestly, I'd just use FAT on your SD cards, as the Panasonic SD card formatter formats them. Not sure if there are any bad side-effects to using ext on an SD card, but it just doesn't seem like the greatest of ideas, and really pretty unnecessary.
 
paulguy said:
Not sure if there are any bad side-effects to using ext on an SD card, but it just doesn't seem like the greatest of ideas, and really pretty unnecessary.

Doesn't it cause Macs to eat your videos?
 
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Never heard of that but I suppose it's possible... but like I said, may as well just use FAT32 for removable storage... unless it's a rather huge drive, then you may be better off just using NTFS. Writing is pretty stable, and if it's just for videos and stuff, it's probably not going to be written to a whole lot.

There really needs to be a decent cross-platform filesystem. Windows has NTFS which is readable and writable pretty well in linux. Linux has ext, which isn't so good in Windows (limited support, few features). Mac OS has HFS+, which nothing else can read or write natively. FAT32 is primitive and doesn't support large volumes, and wastes a lot of space when given large volumes. ExFAT I guess is going to solve that, but I don't think linux has support for that yet, but then it's just not very robust. It fragments badly, doesn't have many features and corrupts easily.

I believe the only partition types that are handled by all 3 OSes in a mature form are ext2, FAT32 and NTFS, but in either case, it's not optimal. I'd likely say your best bet, given smaller volumes is FAT32, then I'd say ext2, then finally NTFS, if you use a lot of Windows machines, and would still like the disk to be usable on them without having to install the driver or in cases where you wouldn't be able to install the driver.

It would be nice if there was a filesystem that was robust and featureful like ext4, but free of stuff like permissions and ownership, so stuff like that doesn't screw up when you move files around, like FAT32, and supported natively by all operating systems in a consistent way, like FAT32.

Of course, everyone hates each other and doesn't want to play along. Microsoft doesn't want to help open source people, nor would they take anything that was open source and use it as a rather major feature, and Apple just seems to prefer their OS being completely incompatible with everything else. Open source people can never agree on ANYTHING so you end up with a whole bunch of ideas and everything being different and not working together ANYWAY, and nobody wants to compromise!

For me, I think I'll just keep my SD cards FAT32 and any external hard drives ext2, since I use linux and Windows, which has passable ext2 support (never encountered a corruption so far.) and I never use Mac OS. If Mac OS's ext2 support is that bad, then I imagine you'd just have to format a larger volume as NTFS and use ntfs-3g on both sides, oddly enough, otherwise use FAT32 for smaller disks.
 
paulguy said:
For me, I think I'll just keep my SD cards FAT32 and any external hard drives ext2, since I use linux and Windows, which has passable ext2 support (never encountered a corruption so far.) and I never use Mac OS. If Mac OS's ext2 support is that bad, then I imagine you'd just have to format a larger volume as NTFS and use ntfs-3g on both sides, oddly enough, otherwise use FAT32 for smaller disks.
Care to point me at the ext2 driver you use on Windows? The only one I could find that even worked is unstable as hell.
 
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paulguy said:
Mac OS has HFS+, which nothing else can read or write natively.
and Apple just seems to prefer their OS being completely incompatible with everything else.
I have HFS+ support on my Kubuntu box - it works just fine. I've had far less problems with that than I have with dealing with NTFS on my folks' box. :p
 
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