Partitioning, Formatting and NAMING External USB Hard Drive Partitions under Ubuntu Linux

You wouldn't believe the computing adventure I?ve just been through. I was given an external USB hard drive (80 gig) to use with my Ubuntu system. When I received it, it had one partition on it (half the drive, the rest left unpartitioned) with the contents of an Ubuntu repository on that partition. I was able to partition the rest of the drive the way I wanted to, except that I couldn't figure out how to give the various partitions names, so that when they are mounted and show up on the desktop, I?ll know which one is which right from the start. Whatever method I tried hit a permissions brick wall (the intention being one partition for the repo, one for backing up the Linux box, and a third for transfers between systems).

I was able to copy the repository contents onto the internal drive, though, so I did some research online, and discovered a method that allowed me to partition, format, and NAME the desired partitions by hooking it up to my OSX Mac.

What I couldn?t do in the native environment I WAS able to do on my Mac. Now, does that make sense? There are a lot of ways in which Linux is fun, but in some rather critical ways, Linux desperately needs to be easier.

Anyway, the package that I found for my Mac is called Ext2FS_1.3.dmg which can be found on sourceforge (so, perhaps there is, or could be, a version for Amiga as well). I know that there are some Linux users here, so hopefully they can point out a much easier way to do things in the future.

@Billsey


for ext2/3 partitions:
e2label

for msdos "mlabel" from mtools package might help.

Edit:
Why not to setup meanigfully named mount points:
sudo mkdir /repo /backups /storage
sudo chmod a+rwx /repo /backups /storage
(permissions)

in /etc/fstab(assuming it is identified as sda, sata might use sda as well, then it might be "sdb", see dmesg for the correct device names)
/dev/sda1 /repo auto rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0
/dev/sda2 /backups auto rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0
/dev/sda3 /storage auto rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0

If you prefer labeling: imho fstab supports mounting by label as well as by /dev/whatever.

Jack

@Jack

With your permission, I am saving this thread as a PDF file (I intend to print it out and tape it up next to my Ubuntu Box for future reference). At the moment, however, I am currently backing up to that USB hard drive, so I won?t be checking your advice just yet.