This isn't really hard drive or distribution dependent, though.
1. Boot into Fedora, as usual.
2. Unpack your Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive, plug it into the nearest power socket and connect it to the computer using the provided USB cable. (I didn't try the FireWire option, yet.)
3. You can "feel" that your computer recognizes something else is in its presence. Just to make sure anyway, you run:
Voila! It sees it and all looks well. If you get a different output, don't panic yet, just type:
If you see this, just run the dmesg command on its own and scroll through looking carefully to where a section similar to the one above shows up. If nothing of this sort shows up, unplug, plug back in, and repeat the command. If it still doesn't show up, you're probably screwed. Or you're doing something stupid, like not turning on the power somewhere.
4. In the previous step, note what it says in the second last line, sda: sda1. This just means the new hard disk is going to be referred to as /dev/sda1, in computer-speak. Good, so you then type (replacing sda1 below with what you saw in your output):
I just received an e-mail informing me that you ought to work with /dev/sda rather than /dev/sda1 when using fdisk. Otherwise, you end up with partitions named sda1p1 and so on if you're creating multiple partitions, which don't have nodes. And that's not pleasant.
And you're in fdisk. There are a lot of things one could possibly do in fdisk (type 'm' followed by enter to see different options), but we'll stick to the basics.
5. First, we print the existing partition table ('p') to get this wonderful output.
For reasons best known to them, drive manufacturers seem to like to pre-partition drives in these and other weird sorts of ways. Anyway, all we're going to do is delete them with the 'd' key. So you go 'd', delete partition 1, 'd' delete partition '2' and so on, until you've removed all 4. Now if you hit 'p', you get the nice blank output below.
6. Good, now that this is an empty drive, we say 'n' and create a new primary partition. Just hit enter when it asks you about start and end blocks, as it will pick the defaults and fill the drive. Which is what I want. It will also default it to a "Linux partition" (83), and then hitting 'p' to verify this yields the output that follows.
7. Everything seems in order. Now we hit 'w' to write this partition table to the drive. When I did this, it complained about not being able to write this cleanly in memory, or something. No matter, shut down the machine, remove the drive and reboot as usual. Plug it in, and then do the dmesg thing again for good measure, if you're the careful sorts. Anyway, you then run (as root):
And grab yourself a cup of coffee (or two) while you're idling waiting for it to finish formatting the drive with a spanking new ext3 partition.
8. Back so soon? Now that it's done, we proceed to mount the drive to some nice sounding location (/mnt/external/) to be able to use it in the future.
9. Again, just for good measure, we type
That's it, you can now use /mnt/external/ as any other directory. Of course, if you'd like to use it as a regular user (not root), you need to create a directory within it and assign the appropriate permissions using chown.
10. The only thing to remember here is, up to now we've not done anything to get it to 'automount' on the next and subsequent boots (if you're keeping the external drive plugged in at all times) or mount it when it is plugged in. For this, you add the last line in the following to your /etc/fstab.
With this, it's set up so that, when you plug the drive in, you can mount (and later unmount) by typing the following.
And that's it for real, I guess. Visit actuality.log for more.