Author: Hongyu

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Format hard drive using fdisk

Got an ATA hard drive hooked to an external USB package and need to reformat the disk to ext3 system.

First, I run fdisk to see what content it has
fdisk -l /dev/sda1

Then, I re-partition it using
fdisk /dev/sda1
select option d to delete the old partion,
and then option n to add a new partition, where I choose the primary partition instead of the extended one. There will be complaint about it’s too large, but since this disk is not going to be used as a boot disk, so I don’t care

Next, I create the ext3 file system on the partition
/sbin/mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda1

After it’s done, I can mount it to my Linux system
mount /dev/sda1 /disk3

Optionally, I can change the percentage of reserved blocks using tune2fs, e.g., from the default 5% to 3%
tune2fs -m3 /dev/sda

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Install NTFS driver for CentOS

First, I download the driver by visiting http://www.linux-ntfs.org

Second, there are two versions of rpm files available for Redhat Enterprise 4, kernel 2.6.9-34.ELsmp, which I downloaded both. But none works. I found there installed locations by running rpm again

rpm -qpl kernel-module-ntfs-2.6.9-34.0.2.ELsmp-2.1.20-0.rr.10.0.i686.rpm

It showed the location is /lib/modules/2.6.9-34.0.2.ELsmp/, but the correct kernel library path is /lib/modules/2.6.9-34.ELsmp/. That’s why modprobe failed to find the installed file. So I copied the file to the correct path

cp -R /lib/modules/2.6.9-34.0.2.ELsmp/kernel/fs/ntfs /lib/modules/2.6.9-34.ELsmp/kernel/fs/

Then I successfully run
modprobe ntfs
dmesg | grep ntfs
mount /dev/sda1 /disk3 -t ntfs -r -o umask=0222

The problem is that the disk mounted is read only

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GPG configuration

Configuration:

1) Copy all key files to the folder under the home directory called .gnupg.
2) Edit file gpg.conf, unmark and change the line
default-recipient me@hongyu.org

Encrypt:
gpg –encrypt-files *

Decrypt:
gpg –decrypt-files *.gpg