how to partition a usb drive
Posts: 23
I have a 120GB USB samsung drive.
I'm completely new to Mepis and linux.
I have tried partitioning the Samsung drive with little success.
What I want to do is completely erase whats on the drive and have an external drive I can add files to.
Here's what I have tried.
Using qtparted have formatted the drive as ext3 or something like that.
However, when I mount the drive there is still 5gb of usage on the disk and a file called lost + found
I cannot delete this file and I cannot add or create any files or folders on the disk.
For example - if I try to create a new folder on the disk I get this error message
"access denied to media/sdb1/new folder"
Please help me with this
thanks
A Little Clarification for You
Posts: 5513
Welcome to the group farcus.
A little clarification for you on what you are seeing.
When you used qtparted to format the drive, you used the ext3 file system. This is one of many different file systems that you can choose from. The ext3 file system is one that happens to be known as a "journaled file system", meaning that tries to keep track of how things are written to the disk, so that it has some ability to recover from data damage. The reason that you have 5 GB of "usage" on the disk is because ext2 and ext3 file systems write "filing information" onto the disk partition for later use. It is similar to how the Windows FAT and NTFS systems will take up some room on the partition for the file system itself. This is essentially the file system that you are seeing.
The "lost+found" directory is created when you MOUNT a partition. It is part of the overall file system. In theory (going back to Unix days), if something were damaged on the partition, and you ran various "fix it" tools like fsck, and the tool found remnants of "possible good information", it would be put into the partition's lost+found directory where you could later look at it and "connect it back" to the real file.
I can't help you on the permissions though. I think it might have to do with exactly how you are allowing the partition to be mounted. Follow Jim's advice and get back to us with the results 
Jon
No computer is magic, no operating system is magic, no website is magic. They all require human interaction, thought, and responsibility to work.
Permissions
Posts: 1109
That lost+found folder is supposed to be there. It's used by the file system. Don't try to remove it. It uses this folder as a storage area for any damaged files it finds when a check of the file system is performed using fsck.
As for your access issues, that sounds like a permissions problem.
Here is a wiki entry about permissions:
http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php/Permissions
One easy to way to change them is to go to KDE Menu>File System>File Manager (Super User Mode) so that you're access it as root.
Then, go to the folder setup for that drive (it's probably under either /mnt or /media). If you right click on the correct folder associated with the new partition (and it sounds like your new partition is /media/sdb1) and select Properties, you'll see a Permissions tab. Root will have read and write access to everything.
Other users may not by default and you can assign a group or specific users permissions as desired. There is an existing group named users that you can grant read and write access to that would probably solve it. You'll also see a check box to include subfolders if desired.
I think there is also a way to modify your /etc/fstab file so that it's mounted read/write by default. But, I'm not very familiar with how to do that. Perhaps others that know more about it will respond.
Jim C.