Daniel Jensen writes:
I purchased an external drive (250GB) and would like to format ext3
to
use for back-ups or additional storage. Since, I'm new to Linux not
sure how to start the process. Any help would be greatly appreciated...
Before you go that route, see if there's an easier way. It's fairly likely
that the drive is already formatted as a FAT filesystem. Also, I presume
that by "external drive" you mean a USB drive.
Plug that drive in, and see what happens. Chances are that an icon will
pop up for your new drive, which you can simply open, and you're ready to
go.
Unless you have some specific reason to use an external ext3-formatted
drive, you might just find that the way things work by default is perfectly
usable for you.
You can always screw around with it later, but why make life difficult for
yourself, if the defaults work out just fine?