Hi Norman_Kent, really glad to hear we’re making some progress!
Others are far better qualified to suggest next steps (my background is mechanical eng…), but until someone chimes in to advise you properly, you can try using the fdisk command to check out the drive and mkfs to reformat it as required.
sudo fdisk -l will show you status of your storage devices
if the HDD is /dev/sda (can verify via the above), then to work on it, enter:
sudo fdisk /dev/sda
then enter a letter corresponding to the list of the commands at the end of this note below. What I do to reformat a drive is
d (delete partition(s))
n (create a new partition). I usually accept the subsequent defaults.
w (write: execute the changes and exit)
Then you can format the drive using the mkfs command, such as, for ext4:
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
You can check the formatted partition using: sudo fdisk /dev/sda -p
Then for mounting and setting permissions, see this link:
Again, I’m not a SW person and the above may be incomplete, or there may be better ways to do this. So I hope the SW pros will quickly jump in!
Berryboot (free download at High-Performance SSDs, HDDs, USB Drives, & Memory Cards | Western Digital) gets around the task of setting-up the drive. It allows multiple OS/apps to be loaded on the HDD, launched via a simple menu. You might want to give it a try.
Thanks.
fdisk commands:
Command (m for help): m
Command action
a toggle a bootable flag
b edit bsd disklabel
c toggle the dos compatibility flag
d delete a partition
l list known partition types
m print this menu
n add a new partition
o create a new empty DOS partition table
p print the partition table
q quit without saving changes
s create a new empty Sun disklabel
t change a partition’s system id
u change display/entry units
v verify the partition table
w write table to disk and exit
x extra functionality (experts only)
