On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Matt G wrote:

> format it any certain way before I put the drive in the machine?  It's
> coming from a windows machine, so it'll be formatted fat32 I guess.  I
> indend on dropping the partitions that are there now, and then
> formatting.

You don't need to have it formatted any special way before you put the
drive into the machine.  You don't even need to reboot after you make the
filesystem (mkextfs -j option to add the ext3 journaling) on it.  In fact,
you may even move your whole system to it and remount it from there
without booting!  Once your kernel and init process are running, anything
is possible.

If its formatted as vfat, it will work; however, you may lose extra
features like file attribute options and such.  I'm not sure if vfat has a
structure that can be resistant against fragmenting during runtime.

> So, I'd make a dir /home/me/temp and mount it there...  copy all my
> stuff from /home/* to /home/me/temp, and then remount it as /home/ with
> my fstab. That's the idea?

That sounds like a plan!  If you put the changes in fstab, your init
scripts will mount the drive at your next boot.

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