I have a brand new USB drive and I want to backup some contents on my server. I hooked up the drive and type “mount -t ext3 /mnt/usb /dev/sdc1” but the drive is not formatted so this gave me an error.
The steps to format the new USB from Ubuntu server command line are as follows:
type “dmesg” to find / make sure you have the correct drive letter (in my case, sdc)
type “fdisk /dev/sdc” (this returns a menu listing)
type “n” for new
type “1” for partition number and use the defaults for start and end points.
Then type “w” to save the changes.
now to format the new partition, type “mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdc1”
then the mount command works.