USB drives usually come formatted for Microsoft Windows.  However, if you want to do some Linux work on the USB drive, then it really needs to be formatted with an ext2 or ext3 file system. If your main PC runs Linux or is a Mac, then you'll be able to perform this easily. If your main PC is a Windows system, however, then it's not obvious how to format the USB drive.

One solution would be to download a Linux live CD, boot it and use its built-in utilities; a functional approach, but a whole lot of work!

The Pogoplug does come with the fdisk utility so you can partition the USB drive.  The Pogoplug does not, however, have the mke2fs utility which creates the ext2/ext3 file systems.  It turns out that the mke2fs utility does not have any dependencies and works standalone.  I have uploaded a zipped copy of mke2fs to the Development Download section of this site. Read on if you are interested in using this utility on the Pogoplug. 

This guide does not change the Pogoplug read only software, so there should be no risk of bricking the Pogoplug - however, as always, proceed carefully and at your own risk. The guide does require connecting to the Pogoplug through either ssh or telnet.  Telnet is available on Windows; these instructions were tested using telnet. (You've probably stopped reading if you're using Linux anyway!)

I'm assuming that: you know the IP address of your Pogoplug, the Pogoplug is connected to your home network, your Windows PC is connected to your home network, your home network is connected to the internet and last but not least, the USB drive you want to format has no useful data as it will be LOST by following this guide.  All text in bold in the following are what you need to type or cut and paste. Let's get started!

1. Power up the Pogoplug with the USB drive you want to format plugged directly into the Pogoplug USB socket.
2. On your Windows PC, open a browser and navigate to "my.pogoplug.com" and eject the USB drive.
3. On your Windows PC, bring up a command prompt and connect to the plug with telnet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx replacing the x's with the Plug's IP address. Login as root with the ceadmin password. You will now be at "/root".
4. Type mount which will list the mounted file systems, the only reference to "/dev"should be "/dev/pts". If there is a reference to "/dev/sda1" then the USB drive has not been properly ejected. Check on "my.pogoplug.com"
5. Lets change to the tmp folder by typing cd /tmp  We're going to get the mke2fs utility we mentioned earlier. Typing pwd will list your path and typing ls will list the contents of the folder which should be "var" and "resolv.conf".
6. To get the mke2fs utility we use the wget utility. Wget goes out to the specified web URL and downloads the file to the current folder.  Type the following: wget http://download.capablenet.com/pogoplug/mke2fs.zip It should only take a few seconds to download.
7. Type ls again and you should now see the "mke2fs.zip" file. Unzip it by typing unzip mke2fs.zip. ls will show the unzipped "mke2fs" utility. We'll use that after we have partitioned the USB drive. But, before we can use it, we must make it executable.
8. Type chmod 755 mke2fs to make it executable. It's executable if it is listed in green text using ls.
9. Now, lets partition the USB drive.Type fdisk /dev/sda typing m will list the commands. Type p to print the current partitions, d to delete partitions and n to create new partitions. When you have the partitions as you want them, use w to write the partition table and exit fdisk. We're ready to create the file system (format?) on the partition(s) we created.
10. To create an ext2 file system on the first partition type ./mke2fs /dev/sda1 It will take a few seconds and give you some statistics about the file system before returning to the bash prompt. An ext3 file system requires a -j option as in ./mke2fs -j /dev/sda1 The partitioning and formatting are complete, now we just need to remount the USB drive.
11. The simplest way to remount the USB drive is to unplug the USB drive and plug it back in. The Pogoplug software will recognize the USB drive and mount it automatically.
12. Return to "my.pogoplug.com", click "refresh" on "My Library" and you should see your USB drive with a "lost+found" folder. We're done with telnet so type exit to get back to the command prompt.

The USB drive is now ready to use with the Pogoplug. You will need to download some special software (Explore2fs – WIN32 explorer for Linux ext2fs partitions) to read the USB drive if you plug it directly into your Windows PC. The mke2fs.zip file that we downloaded to the /tmp folder was in RAM so it will be lost when the Pogoplug is rebooted.

 I have some ideas for other articles that will use an ext2 formatted usb drive... so stay tuned!

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