Re: Reformat Slave HDD - Clarification Please

In article <md0g42l2hth5tfa831a10qih7km47va3bh@xxxxxxx>,
jonah <jonah123@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

do I have to un-mount it first - this book is wittering on about the
kernel getting confused if I do not unmount.

Yes you do. If you're going to reformat a partition, then obviously that
partition must not be mounted .If you're going to reformat/repartition a
whole disk, then none of the disk's existing partitions must be in use
for anything (including swap).

the unmount command example I have is as follows

"umount /media/cdrom"

This makes no sense at all; I apparantly need to unmount a HDD called
"20G Media" this is VERY confusing please clarify the command
parameters to unmount a HDD assuming I need to do so.

I take it the drive is currently connected via a hotplug interface of
some kind (USB?). SuSE has default rules for mounting such a device and
automatically giving it some kind of descriptive name in the /media
directory, which is what you're seeing above.

To find out the real device name, do

cat /proc/mounts

and look for the line mentioning the mount point in /media. For example,

/dev/sdb1 /media/20G_Media ...

(would SuSE put a space in the mount point name?) In this example, the
real device name is /dev/sdb1, which is the first partition on disk sdb.
Now you should be able to do

umount /media/20G_Media

(leave the disk plugged in, of course) and then you can reformat
/dev/sdb1, or even do an fdisk to repartition the whole of /dev/sdb
(assuming there aren't any other /dev/sdbn mounts).

Another thought: would you have to issue the umount command twice?
Because I have sometimes seen two lines in /proc/mount referencing the
same device. Or maybe that was only for non-hotpluggable, removable
media like CDs/DVDs.
.

Relevant Pages

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