CentOS - Jun 2009 - External USB Drive partitioning and formatting

Hi,

I just bought a Seagate 1TB USB drive thinking that I could create a
few partitions in it, format in ext3 fs, then configure bacula to
setup a backup server in my CentOS box and backup my windows and mac
clients.

I have plugged the drive and mounted in /mnt/usbdrive and is seen as
/dev/sdb1 by the OS. The output of df command is:

[root at Production ~]# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                     74859680  16053996  55002960  23% /
/dev/sda1               101086     27066     68801  29% /boot
none                    480176         0    480176   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1            976760032     97808 976662224   1% /mnt/usbdrive

I am thinking of having three partitions instead of just one whole big 1 TB
thing, and then format all three partitions in ext3. I tried doing
fdisk, but cylinders are always confusing for me. Is there any GUI
tool that could help me achieve this as I am newbie to Linux and not
very confident with commands. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

> /dev/sdb1 ? ? ? ? ? ?976760032 ? ? 97808 976662224 ? 1% /mnt/usbdrive
>
> I am thinking of having three partitions instead of just one whole big 1 TB
> thing, and then format all three partitions in ext3. I tried doing
> fdisk, but cylinders are always confusing for me. Is there any GUI
> tool that could help me achieve this as I am newbie to Linux and not
> very confident with commands. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Don't be afraid of fdisk, it's really an easy tool to use.  From your
output above it's quite apparent that your USB drive is located at
/dev/sdb.  First unmount your drive (umount /dev/sdb1) and then run
this command as root:

fdisk /dev/sdb

Then hit "d" to blow away that big vfat partition.  Then you hit
"n"
to create a new partition.  You don't have to know anything about
cylinders, as fdisk will allow you to specify your partition sizes in
megabytes.  Create your three partitions, hit the 'w' key to write out
the new partition table and you're almost done.  Once the partition
table is written you can format your shares like this:

mkfs -text3 /dev/sdb1
mkfs -text3 /dev/sdb2
mkfs -text3 /dev/sdb3

Easy.