guppie wrote:
Im connecting the disks to a ASUS NSLU2 and need to be able to format the disks with the ext3 filesystem, however I cant repartition the disk at all because the firmware protects a part of the disk which fdisk of linus does not allow.
After reading this, I plugged my drive into a Linux box (Ubuntu 9.04) and tried to format it. Since you said fdisk failed, I tried parted. It worked just fine. I was able to partition the drive the way I wanted. Then, I could format the partitions with ext3 and use the drives under Linux. The virtual CD didn’t give me any trouble at all. If you’re having problems, maybe using parted instead of fdisk might work for you. Granted, parted doesn’t support ext3 (at least not my version), but if you repartition with parted, then use mkfs to format, you can get ext3. For that matter, if you just want a single partition, skip parted all together and run makefs to reformat it as ext3.
For those people who want to use it without the virtual CD, if you run the Virtual CD Manager (located on the Virtual CD), it will let you hide the virtual CD partition. From that point, when you plug it into any computer, it looks just like a regular USB drive. Of course, you might want to copy the Virtual CD Manager off the drive before you hide it, just in case you want to change it back later.
It’s true that this won’t free up the space, but I’m not surprised. Getting rid of the virtual CD partition would mean re-partitioning the drive. That means all data would be wiped out. Sure, you may not care if it’s a new drive with no data on it, but you know somebody would have run the utility, removed the partition, then complained that all their pictures and documents were gone. Even with warnings, somebody would accidentally hit yes and lose their data.
Honestly, though, I can’t see 668 MB being a big deal in a drive this size. Even with a “small” 320 GB drive, that’s less than a quarter of a percent of the capacity (about 0.20%). It will store 478 ISO files instead of 479. It will store 63,866 audio files instead of 64,000. It will store 456 videos instead of 457. If somebody had a 668 MB media player, you’d probably laugh at how small it was.
If you want to look at it financially, consider this. If this drive cost you $100 and the price were lowered by the amount of space you’re losing, it would wind up costing you $99.80. If you have a 1 TB drive, it’s even less of a difference, at 6 cents for every $100 it cost you.
Sure, it would be nice to get all the space, but you’re only talking about pennies worth of storage. If 668 MB is going to keep you from storing what you need to on the drive, “you’re gonna need a bigger drive” anyway.
for now :/…