Seagate Free Agent Go 320GB on Ubuntu

I finally bought an external HDD - Seagate Free Agent GO 320 GB. Its a classy little device - fits nicely in my bag. I got it for INR3400/- from Plug n Play, Lamington Road, Mumbai. It came with a 2 year warranty and a auto sync software.

It got detected on my office machine which is a Dell D630 which runs Microsoft Vista. Now since I have Ubuntu Linux at my home, I could not use this out of box. The default format is NFTS that did not let me mount the device on 8.04 LTS.

I initially tried formatting to FAT32, but Vista does not allow this from front end. I tried to format in FAT32 using command line, but it created lot of noise and finally did not format it. Also, I read somewhere about FAT32 creating issues with files larger than 4GB.

I then searched for mounting NTFS HDD on Ubuntu forum and found that if I added couple of additional packages then I could do this.

I had to add the following two packages from the repo:
1. ntfs-3g
2. ntfs-config

Once these were installed and setup for read-write access, I plugged in the HDD and it worked like a charm!!

I can now seamlessly copy data from windows machine to ubuntu and other way...!!

Some extra effort on Ubuntu is worth much more than pain caused by pirated windows!