[conspire] how do I go about deleting a ext. drive contents?

[Peter Knaggs]

On 6/7/07, jose tav <josetav at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Linux finds it, but I can delete its contents, maybe from comand line but
> not sure of the line: del ......
> Windows  see the drive but it doesn't have a drive ID
> Can anyone tell how to do it?
> thanks

Hi Jose,

>From commandline, to delete a single file, the Linux command is
  rm filename
be careful, because there's no "undelete" similar to Microsoft "del",
so usually the file is hard to get back if you accidentally use "rm" on
the wrong file.

I'm not sure what you mean, are you describing the external
drive? If Windows can see the drive, but not access the filesystem,
then it just means that the filesystem on the drive is probably a
Linux one e.g. the "ext3" filesystem containing the root of the
Ubuntu Feisty Fawn that we installed there couple of weeks ago.

There's quite a few concepts to explain here, so I guess it would
take some time. In general, if you absolutely require access to
a filesystem from both Microsoft and Linux, then as far as I know
the simplest way to do so is to format the partition as "fat32".
But such a partition would be unsuitable for containing a Linux
operating system, so we would usually call it the "exchange" partition,
and have another separate partition to contain the Linux "root".
Then Microsoft could "see" the fat32 partition, but couldn't "see"
the contents of the Linux partition. So to exchange data between
Linux and Microsoft, you could copy the file to the "exchange"
partition, and then boot up with Microsoft and copy if from the
exchange partition (which Microsoft can "see").

Hope it helps, it's usually tricky concept to grasp the difference
between a disk, a disk partition, and the filesystem within the
partition, and what purpose the various filesystems can serve.

Cheers,
Peter.