hce> Hi, I bought an external disk (1 BT) and I am only connecting it hce> to a Debian box, not window. Is it a good idea to re-fomat it by hce> ext3? Has anyone done it? What is the procedure and commands to do hce> it? Anything I should be aware of not demage it?
If you bought a new HDD, it might have a filesystem already. Why not use that one as is? You can create a new filesystem too [0] of course but that will "delete" all existing data on the disk -- you can not damage it physically though it that is your concern; you just write new metadata (the new filesystem) onto the disk that is all. From my point of view, if you have a filesystem you can use right away, do so -- why spend time for something, when afterwards nothing really changed from a users point of view. If however the HDD does not have a filesystem installed already and/or you want to have a secure i.e. encrypted disk [1], then you need to install a new filesystem. If you decide to have an encrypted disk, you might also want to initialize the disk for better security[2]. [0] http://sunoano.name/ws/public_xhtml/dm-crypt_luks.html#create_a_file_system_on_top_of_the_logical_virtual_block_device [1] http://sunoano.name/ws/public_xhtml/dm-crypt_luks.html#creation_of_the_logical_virtual_block_device [2] http://sunoano.name/ws/public_xhtml/dm-crypt_luks.html#check_for_errors_and_initialize
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