On Monday 23 October 2006 14:45, jdd wrote:
I have an usb drive new with ntfs on it.
if I plug it in, it's mounted.
as so, I can't make a file system on it (disk mounted) and I can't umount it (nothing relies on it, but umount think it's used)
You should be able to umount it if you didn't access it in any way after inserting it (do not open "My Computer").
what is the standard procedure to have mkfs.ext3 run on it? may I use -F without risk (the drive is empty)
I would try to destroy the NTFS filesystem first (even if it's mounted). As root: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdXY bs=1M count=10 ## replace sdXY with whatever your USB drive is and whatever partition you want to wipe. CAUTION: if you get this wrong you might erase something else. Or you can get more radical and erase the partition table on the drive dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1 Then reboot and recreate partitions on it with YaST Partitioner or whatever you know. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org