This is really a two part question. I've never formatted a hard dirve on Linux/Unix, so please bear with me.I had an old Windows machine which recently died. So I decided to put the hard drive into my Ubuntu server. This hard drive is currently NTFS file format, the Disk info is as follows   description: ATA Disk   product: SAMSUNG HD502HI   physical id: 0.0.0   bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0   logical name: /dev/sdb   version: 1AG0   serial:   size: 465GiB (500GB)   capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos   configuration: ansiversion=5 sectorsize=512 signature=000c6181Part OneI need to get some files of this hard drive, but when I try to mount the hard drive all that seems to mount is the /boot partition. Here is what I am doingEdit fstab and add the following: /dev/sdb /media/Microsoft ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0Then after this I mount using the following commandsudo mount -ro /dev/sdb /media/Microsoft Can some one tell me what I am doing wrong, and how I can mount the right partition?Part TwoOnce I have successfully mounted the hard drive and copied the files. How do I go about formatting the hard drive and make it usable for my Linux system? From what I have read I have to do something likemkfs.ext3 /dev/sdbthen create a partition using fdiskCan some one direct me to what I actually need to do?
Format windows (NTFS) hard drive on Ubuntu using command line
filesystems;mount;ntfs;fdisk
Depending on who set up the old Windows machine (ie: if it's from HP, Lenovo, etc) you may have many different partitions on the disk that you normally wouldn't see with Windows.  Those partitions might include recovery, unused space, etc.  As mentioned in the answer above, use fdisk to see the partitions.fdisk -l /dev/sdbUsing that information you can find out which partition is where the files you need are located.  The largest partition is probably the one you want.Depending on your distribution and version of Windows, you might need to get the ntfs-4g package in order to mount the disk.  It looks like you wanted to mount it readonly and that you expect it to be ntfs3 based on your fstab entry.mount -o ro /dev/sdbX /media/MicrosoftFor the second part of the question you should have several options depending on what you want to do.  You can make a normal file systems with mkfs or you could create a logical volume.  If you have a modern installation of a recent linux distribution then your system is more than likely using LVM - you can check with the command vgs.  If you receive output with details about a volume group then LVM is in place.  You could add the disk to LVM to expand your existing partitions or create a new, independent disk that is mounted somewhere separately.