kb5050
Tue Apr 14, 2015 7:35:13 pm
After many google searches I found the most simplest solution, is already built into Zorin. This is for the NewBies.
I spent an hour trying to format a new hard drive, I am using for storage and backup.
While you THINK that Simply to use Gparted is the simple way, and indeed it will format your drive, the problem comes in this way.
If you want to format the drive in anything other than NTFS there exits an age old problem to use Gparted, as it will not give Ownership to your account.
What this means is doing the steps of Create Partition, as etx4 for example, Apply, Format to ext4, will produce a fully working drive. No problem.
But the drive will not allow user *** to access it because Gparted will assign ownership to root instead of user ***.
Ok so yes there are ways around this, but it basically is too much effort for a Newbies Brain to handle.
Instead Zorin (and Ubuntu) have a very nice built in application called Disks. (Disk Utility in Ubuntu)
This very nice Graphical utility is there to do many things easily and one of them is to partition and format new hardware and make it instantly usable now and forever.
So from the menu locate Disks Icon it is in Accessories.
I included a screenshot in this post for those to look at.
It is my computer, and shows my 200GB drive, and the windows 8 partition is focused in blue.
So to use this tool, you pick the drive you want to partition and format, It will normally be the one will show up as Unpartitioned.
however if you already had a partiton that Gparted or other software had created it will see that.
If it is unpartitioned then proceed to the Gears Icon and well if all is well you will get a dropdown menu that is nearly self explanatory but as you can see there are tons of options.
Ok so below it as 3 icons, A solid right arrow >, an underscore _ and a set of gears.
For our purposes you actully do not want to Mount the drive which is the Arrow and hovering over it will show that.
If you want to remove any leftover or factory installed partitions then the Underscore is the one. You can remove one or all depends on what you want to do.
So the gears are now what you need, and Plan what you are going to do here very carefully but if you are sure, then proceed to create a new partition with type ext4 and You can as I do Label it to your desire.
For this example were going to Create a New Partition, and then Format it. Avoid making it bootable, as that is only if your trying to clone or install a new Linux on it.
Again to warn this is a powerful tool, and WILL destroy data easily if your foolhardy.
Then with the new partitiuon, showing up in the Blue Blocks, you click on it, Click Gears and Format. Choose the type of filesystem you desire.
Apply the actions and it will proceed and after complete, your done.
Now take my advice and restart your system, so that Zorin can remount all the drives, and you have a clean slate.
Notice also at the end of the whole process, it shows you that YOU are the owner of this drive, and filesystem, and not root. Thats what Gparted did not do, and explains why it fails.
Please feel free to make and poke fun at this. But after ripping my hair out, looking at endless terminal ways to do this, I had it all done in mere seconds rather than hours of wasted time.
IHMO I propose that the creators of Zorin rewrite their Installer to make use of this tool, in place of using Gparted in the Something Else method of installing Zorin. To most anyone it would make so much more sense.
I spent an hour trying to format a new hard drive, I am using for storage and backup.
While you THINK that Simply to use Gparted is the simple way, and indeed it will format your drive, the problem comes in this way.
If you want to format the drive in anything other than NTFS there exits an age old problem to use Gparted, as it will not give Ownership to your account.
What this means is doing the steps of Create Partition, as etx4 for example, Apply, Format to ext4, will produce a fully working drive. No problem.
But the drive will not allow user *** to access it because Gparted will assign ownership to root instead of user ***.
Ok so yes there are ways around this, but it basically is too much effort for a Newbies Brain to handle.
Instead Zorin (and Ubuntu) have a very nice built in application called Disks. (Disk Utility in Ubuntu)
This very nice Graphical utility is there to do many things easily and one of them is to partition and format new hardware and make it instantly usable now and forever.
So from the menu locate Disks Icon it is in Accessories.
I included a screenshot in this post for those to look at.
It is my computer, and shows my 200GB drive, and the windows 8 partition is focused in blue.
So to use this tool, you pick the drive you want to partition and format, It will normally be the one will show up as Unpartitioned.
however if you already had a partiton that Gparted or other software had created it will see that.
If it is unpartitioned then proceed to the Gears Icon and well if all is well you will get a dropdown menu that is nearly self explanatory but as you can see there are tons of options.
Ok so below it as 3 icons, A solid right arrow >, an underscore _ and a set of gears.
For our purposes you actully do not want to Mount the drive which is the Arrow and hovering over it will show that.
If you want to remove any leftover or factory installed partitions then the Underscore is the one. You can remove one or all depends on what you want to do.
So the gears are now what you need, and Plan what you are going to do here very carefully but if you are sure, then proceed to create a new partition with type ext4 and You can as I do Label it to your desire.
For this example were going to Create a New Partition, and then Format it. Avoid making it bootable, as that is only if your trying to clone or install a new Linux on it.
Again to warn this is a powerful tool, and WILL destroy data easily if your foolhardy.
Then with the new partitiuon, showing up in the Blue Blocks, you click on it, Click Gears and Format. Choose the type of filesystem you desire.
Apply the actions and it will proceed and after complete, your done.
Now take my advice and restart your system, so that Zorin can remount all the drives, and you have a clean slate.
Notice also at the end of the whole process, it shows you that YOU are the owner of this drive, and filesystem, and not root. Thats what Gparted did not do, and explains why it fails.
Please feel free to make and poke fun at this. But after ripping my hair out, looking at endless terminal ways to do this, I had it all done in mere seconds rather than hours of wasted time.
IHMO I propose that the creators of Zorin rewrite their Installer to make use of this tool, in place of using Gparted in the Something Else method of installing Zorin. To most anyone it would make so much more sense.
- Image of Disks Application