Preparation

Some tidying up and moving things around on the MyBook World (henceforth referred to as MBW).

The MBW has a USB socket on the back for connecting external drives to, so my 250Gb LaCie is now plugged in to make it always available. This will be used for windows backups. (Currently using Cobian but getting errors when using compression... may have to try something else).

The USB drive was automatically recognised and mounted under /shares/external, but with no write permission as it was currently formatted as NTFS.

Unmount the drive, which for me appears as /dev/sdb1

root> umount /dev/sdb1

Then use fdisk to reformat the drive

root> fdisk /dev/sdb1
Command (m for help): d
Command (m for help): n

Create a single primary partition

Command (m for help): w

Then create an ext3 file system on the partition

root> /sbin/mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

Reboot and the drive should be mounted under /shares/external as a writable filesystem.

Use the WD Shared Storage Manager to create a new public share called BACKUPS. The only person with write permission will be me as I'm the only PC user running the backup software.

Gotcha: I tried to use fdisk to change the partition's System ID. This was 83 (Linux) by default. I tried to make it fd (Linux raid auto) to match the MBW's internal disk. This continually failed with an illegal argument error. I eventually realised that Linux raid auto is only valid for a disk attached via a RAID controller which the internal disk must be. The USB disk, of course, isn't. Half an hour of my life I'll never get back.