How to mount an external drive (in fuseblk) as ext4 file system?

Question

I bought a 3TB WD Elements external hard drive. Now I want to mount it to my Ubuntu server (which runs inside WinXP/VMware), so that I can move Mysql database to it.

It was auto-mounted under /media/Elements

The first problem is: I cannot change the ownership of any files under media/Elements. I thought the problem is the file system of media/Elements is fuseblk.

> sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 10.7 GB, 10737418240 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1305 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00004cdb

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        1244     9990144   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            1244        1306      492545    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            1244        1306      492544   82  Linux swap / Solaris
Note: sector size is 4096 (not 512)

Disk /dev/sdc: 3000.6 GB, 3000590401536 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 45600 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 4096 = 65802240 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00052a80

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1       45601  2930263040    7  HPFS/NTFS

Then I tried to reformat the external drive with gparted, but it ignored to operate on one with 4096 sector size.

sudo gparted
======================
libparted : 2.2
======================
Device /dev/sdc has a logical sector size of 4096.  Not all parts of GNU Parted support this at the moment, and the working code is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL.

Ignoring device /dev/sdc with logical sector size of 4096 bytes because gparted only supports a size of 512 bytes.

My final goal is to let Mysql runs on the data stored in this external drive, any solutions?

Solution

You can skip repartitioning the hard drive. It is already partitioned as a single large partition that covers the entire disk, which is probably what you want. Just go ahead and create an ext4 filesystem on /dev/sdc1:

mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdc1

Don't forget to unmount it (from /media/Elements) or wherever it is mounted) before you create the new filesystem!

If you still want to repartition it, try using gdisk (partition manager that handles the modern GUID partition table type) or fdisk (traditional partition manager), since apparently gparted doesn't want to deal with this disk.

Comments

[Mikko Rantalainen]

Just a pointer to future readers that if mount displays fuseblk it usually means that the underlying filesystem is actually NTFS or exFat. You cannot simply mount any filesystem as another filesystem but you can re-format a filesystem as another (and obviously losing all data on the original filesystem). For example, if the device is /dev/sdc, the first partition is /dev/sdc1 and you can re-format it to ext4 by running mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdc1 as root. Linux even supports using the whole block device (e.g. /dev/sdc vs sdc1) as filesystem target but that is NOT recommended.

[JackWM]

Thanks a lot. You really got the point, and solve it in the simplest way!