My apologies. I was not clear. Sorry you went to so much trouble for your long explanation. There is nothing on the disks. Years ago I had a fileserver, but it was less convenient than i expected (i would say save and exit, some issue would prevent the save, and the exit would still occur, so I lost all my changes, among other issues), so I basically only used it for backup, but also backed up onto usb disks. so when it died, I just left it. I am working towards a new file server. but the machine i bought has a graphics card not supported by linux. I bought another card but have not installed it yet. in the meantime I need to clear space, archive files off my linux desktop, and off my three winblows zoom computers, all to eventually go on the fileserver. I bought two disks (always need two copies of backup). Linux appeared to do nothing with them. One box was marked "usb case", so I feared I had gotten taken in by someone selling an empty case as if it was it contained a disk. They seemed to heavy to be empty, so I plugged them into one of my winblows computers, and they were fine. wasted days assuming I just needed to install (newer) exfat support on my linux desktop so I could move files from there onto them. I am still curious if there is a good reason for linux to NOT accept them when winblows will. are there linux distros that will? Will BSD or Solaris accept them? will Crapple? what if somebody filled one of those disks and gave it to me, would I be totally out of luck if I did not have a winblows system? even if linux itself would not automatically mount the disks, WHY THE F*CK won't GParted identify what they are? I consider that totally unacceptable. GParted should warn me, else I just go ahead and format them, wiping out gigabytes of data on them. If possible, I would like to format them in a way that it preserves some level of linux file ownership, permissions, etc., and still be useable from winblows. the files coming from winblows I don't care about, they are just downloads and zoom logs/videos. And the linux probably doesn't really matter, after loading them onto my future fileserver, I'll have to fix ownerships anyway (although preserving executability could be useful). I don't think it is important enough add the ability to read linux filesystems to winblows. so just create a partition table with one big partition, formatted exfat? Any easy alternatives that would give me some advantages? I come from a mainframe world, so still am confused by personal world. Maybe format the disks as exfat, and for general data files, just copy them, but for other backups, put them into tar files so they can come back out with file permissions? tar and compress? how much harder does that make it for me to retrieve something? as in put them in tar files but no bigger than 100 MB per file? and recommendations on which compression program? <pre>--Carey</pre>
On 10/23/2024 11:48 AM CDT o1bigtenor via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 11:23 AM CAREY SCHUG via talk <talk@gtalug.org> 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)
Yes, it appears to just be one big filesystem
1. why is GParted unwilling to recognize that? 2. is there some command I can do in gparted to recognize it? 3. why is Linux unwilling to recognize and mount it 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)
Here's 'a' possible option. If its all one big partition - - - 1. shrink size of partition to whatever size you feel you need for your M$ partition (I add this step for security - - - - you do have a backup opf the M$ stuff - - - yes?) 2. boot into M$ win to confirm that everything is still working 3. go back to your (either of gparted run from another disk or your systemrescue dvd/usb stick) and do your partitioning (make sure you actually write those partitions) (you could also check here if you want to make sure the number and order of your partitions is the way you want it but that's optional (imo)) 4. Do your install (make sure to tell the installer software which partitions to use and whatnot (I use labels!!) 5. complete the rest of the install 6. double check after install is optional now if you aren't installing a new system then you will need to be telling your system which partitions mean what and how to use them. (That's something I don't know much about so I'll leave that for someone who does!)
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