Partitioning suggestions

[kiel]

Say I have a 80 gig drive with all my et/home all my files on one drive, and I bought a 160 gig drive, I would like to make a drive for storage for movies and music, how should I format it and or set it up?

[cybertron]

Please use a descriptive title for your posts. It makes everyone's life easier and makes it more likely that you will get an answer to your question. I've fixed it for you on this thread, but in the future keep that in mind.

I'm a little confused as to what exactly you're asking too. Are you adding the 160 GB drive to the 80 GB, or are you replacing the 80?

[saikee]

I think movies (and even music) should be on a USB hard disk. How often do you watch the movies? Do you really want to spin the hard disk to death while not watching the movies in most of the time when you use the PC? With it in a USB connection you can switch it on whenever needed and the disk can last considerably longer.

[kiel]

80Gig is the master drive
160 gig is a secondary drive

So what I want to do is partition it so that I can use it for Photographs/Music

I was thinking maybe making it ext with label storage?? but the problem is I have photo's/music I dont want to loose, and it is currently a NTFS file system, so I need to retrieve the data before I do anything to it
---------
let me throw it out different, I have debain installed and I do some photography work and I have music and such, leaving windows, going to linux, been running debain on vmware for ahwile now, but I have a extra drive 160 gig, now, i need to merge them all, how should I go about it..

[saikee]

May be we do not know your problem.

Even if you have a new hard disk as big as 1.5TB or as small as 1Gb it cannot be used to store information until you have created a partition, format it and then copy information onto it. That is standard in every operating system.

You can copy data from a partition formatted to any filing system to place the same in another partition of a different filing system. The content of the data doesn't get changed.

If your problem is time as it can be time consuming to retrieve every file from the old disk then you can clone the 80Gb disk onto the 160Gb unit and able to use it right away. You can then resize the partitions to give extra space to whichever area you wish to expand. You can then consider the future options of how to deal with the 80Gb unit.

The cloning will preserve your Windows as the host, Debian as a guest in your VMWare set up. I think you need Raid or employ another storage management layer to merge the two disks as one storage unit in Windows. Had your host been Debian then you can use LVM to merge the extra disk.

In conclusion it all depends on your existing set up and where you want to end up eventually. To me the safest way to to migrate the systems from the 80Gb to the 160Gb disk. You then have a backup and able to experiemnt with different options. If you make a mess you can put the backup in and try again.

[cybertron]

I was thinking maybe making it ext with label storage??
Ext is generally a safe bet. I use XFS for my multimedia storage drives, but they're RAID and backed up nightly so I'm not overly concerned about losing anything (or more accurately I am concerned, but I've done everything I can do mitigate the risk).
but the problem is I have photo's/music I dont want to loose, and it is currently a NTFS file system, so I need to retrieve the data before I do anything to it
On the 160? I got the impression that was a new drive. If you have data on there that you need to save you'll have to find some way to back it up because there's no way to convert from NTFS to a Linux filesystem without formatting. If your files are just on the 80 gig then I agree with saikee - just format the 160 and copy everything to that, then reformat the 80 as whatever you want.

[Pierre2]

the 160Gb drive will come pre-formatted to NTFS.
you will need to format it to fat32, if you want to read it under both M$ & lnx.
otherwise just format it ( with Gparted, ) to ext3.
(using a live cd, or your current lnx O/S ), but is it a usb ext drive, for have you mounted it inside your PC ??. either way, does not matter.

I have a 250Gb usb drive, formatted to fat32, for my data N stuff.

[cybertron]

the 160Gb drive will come pre-formatted to NTFS.
you will need to format it to fat32, if you want to read it under both M$ & lnx.
Not necessarily. In my experience the ntfs-3g driver works quite well both read and write on NTFS partitions. Not that my experience is particularly extensive because I try to avoid NTFS wherever possible, but it does work in Linux these days.

[Pierre2]

I came from a W98 background, only recently dealt with M$xp, so I prefer FAT32.
it is more native to lnx as well. The ntfs-3g driver works quite well on both read and write for NTFS partitions, but is a more recent developement. it's still another driver, to use, where as Fat32 is more the original lnx way.
:)
it's also easier to deal with, defrag wise & scandisk under M$xp.

[DanceMan]

FAT32 has a 4G file limit, which can hamper its usefulness in these days of larger files.

Linux has benn reading NTFS easily for years now, only writing to NTFS is recent.

[Pafnoutios]

I have a 300GB drive I use for media. I found it easiest to format the whole thing as ext3 (use -I 128 I think to force the inodes to 128B instead of the new default of 256B). Then I installed ext2IFS in windows to read my media drive. I keep only stuff to be shared on that partition (music, videos, no sensitive data) so it doesn't matter to me that Windows won't respect the permissions. I've always had a hard time getting the umask in mount to work the way I wanted it to with a shared NTFS partition.