USB disk drives are very handy, but the 3.5 inch models can be impractical to carry around having the separate power supply they all need. I therefore opted for buying a 2.5 inch disk and USB case. Since I wanted a reliable disk I bought a Seagate (never had a problem with Seagate disks, neither has my sysadim friends). Seagate sells ready made USB disks, but you might as well buy a 2.5 inch disc and a simple case from Tsunami or some other vendor and assemble it yourself. The Tsunami case is simple but functional, the only issue is that the power LED never lights. Who needs it anyway?

Trying to format the USB disk for use with both Linux and Windows causes some headache. The problem is that in Ubuntu Linux, the disc could easily be found, partitioned and formated for FAT32.

The process is roughly described below (warning, use of fdisk can kill your running system if you mess with the wrong disk):

>> cat /proc/diskstats

8 0 sda 190643 1162819 34583666 1559068 129104 491369 4973016 16676268 0 961216 18238344

8 1 sda1 787 799 0 0

8 2 sda2 1229104 9815302 0 0

8 3 sda3 167 804 8710 69680

8 4 sda4 3 6 0 0

8 5 sda5 8792 1987981 23405 175240

8 6 sda6 3771 488878 38512 302896

11 0 sr0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

254 0 dm-0 3599 0 47824 347464 378512 0 3026 2502196 0 3452 21872

8 16 sdb 63 440 944 312 0 0 0 0 0 18 312

8 17 sdb1 470 680 0 0

Take a look at the listing. You are looking for devices like sdb with no subentries like sdb1 meaning the disk is empty. This will give you a good clue about the name of your device. If you have a lap top, you only have one internal disk so it is normally a safe bet that ssdb is the external disk. Another clue is that your lap top internal disk (sda) often has several partitions.

>> fdisk /dev/sdb (or whatever is your disks device)

in fdisk menus add one primary partition and save.

>> mkfs -t VFAT -F 32 /dev/sdb1 (again, device name may vary)

Because Windows refuses to show this disk in the explorer, another way had to be found.