On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 11:22:48AM -0500, CAREY SCHUG wrote:
Thank you.
(wow, Lennart...univ of waterloo was a big pert in the early days of my first career, VM/370 and successors on mainframes)
Yeah I went there in the second half of the 90s and graduated in 2000. They still had the giant room from the old IBM but near the end they started to get rid of it to make more classroom space instead.
Yes, it appears to just be one big filesystem
1. why is GParted unwilling to recognize that?
It is a partition tool and you pointed it at something that is not partitioned. It is outside it's scope of work.
2. is there some command I can do in gparted to recognize it?
I doubt it.
3. why is Linux unwilling to recognize and mount it
I would expect you can mount it manually assuming your kernel is new enough to support the filesystem. I would expect this to work on any distribution made in the last 5 years or so: mount -t exfat /dev/sdc /mnt If you mean automount, well then that depends on which automount tool is being used. In fact one problem could be that it might not have loaded the exfat module and hence doesn't automatically recognize the filesystem. It that is the only problem, adding exfat to list of modules to load at boot would help. There should be something like /etc/modules-load.d/ or similar for a place to put modules to load.
4. is there something I can add to linux so that it will? 5. or recommendations for formatting in gparted so winblows and linux can both use this (I back up winblows user data to usb disks, some data going to linux, some going just to archive)
If you set it up with a single partition both should be happy to recognize it, as long as you use a filesystem both support. exfat is probably the one normally used for large drives these days. I think I tend to use NTFS on large drives out of old habits, and the linux support for NTFS usually seems fine too. -- Len Sorensen