File system for external hdd

[greekislandlover]

I think I know the answer to this, but just want to run it by the people who know.

Just got a Pi and am playing around with what it can do. I'm thinking of formatting the SD card and starting again with a fresh install, and was wondering if changing the hdd to ext4 filesystem would be a good idea. Currently is vfat. I know I'll lose all data but there is nothing on the drive that isn't backed up elsewhere.

The issue I'm having is with some of my installations permissions are not always working, so I was thinking having it as a linux filesystem might help?

[redhawk]

Are you sharing the external hard drive with a Windows or Mac PC??

Richard S.

[greekislandlover]

Yes. But I seem to remember that when I had a Ubuntu server it worked Ok talking to Windoze?

[GTR2Fan]

You could shrink you original partition then make an Ext4 partition after it to hold your '/root' partition if you like. That's what I did with the 1.5TB media storage HDD I have directly connected to the Pi at all times. It was originally formatted to NTFS and I wanted to keep it easily accessible over the network from (or if directly connected to) Windows devices connected to the same network, so it seemed the obvious thing to do.

Here's a simple PDF guide to how I achieved this using a Windows PC for the partition transfer...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/431 ... %20HDD.pdf

[RaTTuS]

if you want to plug the external HD into a windows system then you will have problems with ext4 -
if you are always going have the HD plugged into the RPi and sharfe it via samba then formatting as ext4 is the way to go

[greekislandlover]

if you want to plug the external HD into a windows system then you will have problems with ext4 -
if you are always going have the HD plugged into the RPi and sharfe it via samba then formatting as ext4 is the way to go

That's what I should have specified. The HDD will be permanently connected to the Pi and some content shared to Windows via Samba. I'll go this route. Thanks