On December Sunday 07 2008, jfweber@gilweber.com scratched these words onto a coconut shell, hoping for an answer:

Does anyone have one? & if so, what file system did you reformat as? Got G one of those take this drive everywhere , drives , which of course is tied to Windows.

Bigger problem it's ntfs and the mount command says it's got a bad superblock which is code for "I don wanna" . ;-) That and needing to have root permissions seem to be the only downsides. It is seen as a separate drive.. It's certainly a good idea to reformat but what file system to?

He needs to be able to put his files on it and take it to his teaching gigs. they play under linux.. right now there are only a couple of windows programs to do something, but we don't know what .

Maybe reformat to some linux system , and put the multi media stuff on it, and perhaps install some windows thing under wine, or w/ the Codeweavers Crossover Office and it should be good to go, no?

Thanks, it's going to turn up again I'm certain, so any help will get the user extra good Karma points. ;D

K, so I'm posting to myself.. but in case anyone gets one of these little gems, let me tell you what we found. you only need the windows programs, which are only for automated backup BTW, is if you want to do auto backups of windows computers... gee whiz.. that had been my first guess but was confirmed absolutely by seagate today.. ( yay!! ) SO, first order of biz is to reformat drive. for reasons I can't fathom ,this is strangely complex and not at all trivial to do via the latest ubuntu. They REALLY need something like yast to make this sort of silliness a one or two click deal. However, it did get done, then the idea was to create a folder to encompass the rest of the drive and that folder could then have him as first owner and admin as group, probably a goodly idea considering it *is* a portable drive. I recommend the thing, for Suse should be fairly easy to have yast do the reformat and partitions even create an fstab entry. If it had to be as root, root certainly has the right to change such permissions when the nasty stuff has been done... I don't understand why EVERYTHING except email and web surfing has to be so hard in ubuntu.There seems only to be uber geek mode or surfer mode and nothing else.. Editorial: That is going to be a problem for Linux generally, if distros turn their versions into idiot and super pro, there will be a lot of folks saying that Linux isn't linux, cuz the ones I've seen which take this approach, really aren't linux as we know it. Not just the Yast situation, but to do anything you need to know "our" variant of the commands and how to get them, and the lack of man pages which tell you a lot, if you want to look at them and try stuff. Most new users are conditioned by MS versions to think they need to start completely over, so in effect they are pretty cautions about changing things willy nilly. For what it's worth, I think there needs to be discussions at least of users to see that what should be a basic command set functions the same in all versions , and can be accessed in the same way. Just as we hammer away at the reasons for root, and why ppl ought not try to do their day ti day stuff as root, that can still be done while at least giving the more adventurous or those who have acquired some knowledge the right to mess up their own boxen. Some folks need to get burned to learn. And anything that is going to mess up their world, can have messages surrounding the actual key press that makes it work. ( *Have you made a complete backup? IF not, you certainly should...* and similar will scare most of the "I wonder what this does" people. And w/ similar notes they are then on their own. That is they have been suitably warned. You tell most folks they are going to need to be certain they are completely backed up, so their own data is safe, they aren't going to get past that. But if it's something they absolutely must do, they will do at least that back up. ;D -- j "Its like a song I can hear playing right in my ear That I cant sing I cant help listening" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org