How do I Format and external USB drive

[allen875]

Hello, I have been looking into how to format my USB external drives to the UFS filesystem to add them to my server build to be shared thru the network. I have read the freeBSD handbook on external drives but it's not clearly defined as to how to do this.

It seems that fdisk is the utility to use, so two questions.

1.) What is the command to create the filesystem?

2.) Is there a graphical disk utility (ie gparted) that has unix filesystem capability?

Thanks.

[allen875]

Use the freeBSD system installer to format your hard drives.
#su
#sysinstall
(Goto configure, then goto fdisk and select the da# of the drive)
Exit out of the sysinstall program, create the drives mounting directory.
#sudo mkdir /media/music
#sudo mkdir /media/videos
now restart the sysinstall program.
#su
#sysinstall
(Goto configure, then goto label and select the da# of the drive)

add the following line to your /etc/fstab
/dev/da0s1d /media/videos ufs rw,noexec,nosuid 0 0
/dev/da1s1d /media/music ufs rw,noexec,nosuid 0 0

[keirawatson]

One way to format a drive in windows is to go into my computer, find the drive letter that you want to format, right click on the drive and choose format. Then press start. But keep in mind, they data will be gone, but it's possible to recover the data for anyone ambitious.Partition magic might offer a secure erase, which will make the recovery more difficult. If not there are programs that do so, a simple google search should suffice.