Yep. I use gparted quite a bit, though for some (not all) tasks lately I've found gnome-disk-utility slightly more user-friendly. And for USB sticks I generally use mint-stick tools simply because they are quick and relatively good at telling you what disks are what i.e., don't have to remember which /dev/sdX to use. And they only offer the USB connected drives with both path and the manufacturer name and capacity. I find that helpful in avoiding "oops, wrong drive". I swapped disks yesterday and then formatted new one ext4. Then copied files from home repo of files. About 2 TB, but it went faster than when ntfs / fuseblk. Best, JN On 2019-01-08 9:33 a.m., tf [ at ] greenbullfrog [ dot ] com wrote: > JN, > > As hinted-at in the post from Raj, the modern-day partition utility is parted (cli). The GUI equivalent is gparted. You > can query your drive with: > > # parted /dev/sde p > > If you do replace your disk, or repartition and reformat it, you will want to label it gpt, not dos. > > (warning, dangerous, data-loss etc) > > # parted /dev/sdX mklabel gpt > > > Tim > > > On 2019-01-07 12:05, Raj wrote: >> looks to me the WD is more in need of reformatting than the Seagate, >> especially for 4k blocks. You could set the filesytem label with >> fdisk without affecting anything, but it wouldn't fix the 512byte >> logical blocksize the drive is reporting. Most modern drives now are >> 4k physical sectors, using 512 is going to result in reduced >> performance + life, so you want to reformat to 4k as soon as possible. >> It was also necessary to align to the 4k boundary, but I believe >> fdisk/gparted does it automatically now. >> >> Disk /dev/sdf: 2.7 TiB, 3000558944256 bytes, 5860466688 sectors >> Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes >> Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes >> >> On Mon, Jan 7, 2019 at 10:06 AM J C Nash <profjcnash [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com> wrote: >> >>> I recall reformatting the Seagate not long after purchasing. Got >>> lazy with the >>> WD, but will at some time do this (carefully!). Given the cost of >>> disks today, >>> if I value my time, I'll probably just buy a new one and format it >>> right away >>> then copy. >>> >>> Best, JN >>> >>> On 2019-01-07 9:59 a.m., Dianne Skoll wrote: >>>> On Mon, 7 Jan 2019 09:54:13 -0500 >>>> J C Nash <profjcnash [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com> wrote: >>>> >>>>> The "mount" information says Seagate is ext4, but fdisk thinks >>> its >>>>> dos. Controller circuitry in the disks for the USB perhaps? >>>> >>>> No, it's not a hardware issue. "fdisk" reports partition types >>> and those >>>> are just hints. I don't believe Linux actually cares about the >>> partition >>>> type; you can have a DOS partition type formatted as an ext4 file >>> system >>>> and Linux will be perfectly happy to mount it as ext4. >>>> >>>> However, take a look at this mount output: >>>> >>>>> /dev/sdf1 on /media/john/RedWD3T type fuseblk >>>> >>>> fuseblk is a user-space file system driver used to mount NTFS or >>> other >>>> filesystems. Being user-space, it's going to be really, really >>> slow. >>>> >>>> If you can do so without losing data, I'd repartition and reformat >>> the WD >>>> disk to be a native ext4 file system. >>>> >>>> Regards, >>>> >>>> Dianne. >>>> > > To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscribe [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org > To get help send a blank message to linux+help [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org > To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org > To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscribe [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org To get help send a blank message to linux+help [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org