Best way to format a new drive.

[Sulforaphane]

Hello.

I've recently had a bad experience formatting a newly acquired drive to EXT4 on Windows.

Therefore I am curious to what the best, most reliable and safest way of formatting a drive on Raspberry Pi to EXT4?

Thanks in advance!

[DougieLawson]

Use gparted.

[graysky]

Never use a Linux native port on Windows for something like formatting a disk. What is wrong with using the provided

Code: Select all

mkfs.ext4

command? Just TRIPLE check you are applying it to the correct partition. If you haven't yet partitioned, use

Code: Select all

fdisk

or

Code: Select all

gdisk

and observe the same warning.

To help:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fi ... ile_system
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Partitioning

[Sulforaphane]

Never use a Linux native port on Windows for something like formatting a disk. What is wrong with using the provided

Code: Select all

mkfs.ext4

command? Just TRIPLE check you are applying it to the correct partition. If you haven't yet partitioned, use

Code: Select all

fdisk

or

Code: Select all

gdisk

and observe the same warning.

To help:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fi ... ile_system
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Partitioning

After having formated it says with sudo fdisk -l:
/dev/sda1 2048 3906961407 3906959360 1,8T Microsoft basic data

[Sulforaphane]

Use gparted.

When formatting it says it has 1 mb unallocated space, that I don't seem to be able to format with gparted. Any way to do this?

[DougieLawson]

Don't worry about it. In the grand scheme of things 1MB is a drop in the ocean.

[graysky]

After having formated it says with sudo fdisk -l:
/dev/sda1 2048 3906961407 3906959360 1,8T Microsoft basic data

I assume you have not yet copied any data to the drive... you need to change the partition type from within fdisk (ext4 is type 'linux' or something similar as I recall). Without seeing the partition layout, I will assume the 1MB of unallocated space is to keep the partition aligned. It's been too long since I needed to partition a drive.

As a general practice, do not invoke commands with sudo unless you really need to ...