Not exactly a KDE question, I know, but still;

I have an external HD I use for backup purposes, when I had it, most distros still had trouble reading NTFS, so doing a bit of research, I formatted it to EXT3. For the past (almost) two years it's been like that, but I recently had to transfer a large amount of files to a Windows box, so it was formatted back to NTFS, after doing so, back to EXT3 it was.

Now, here's my problem, I've tried formatting it under Kubuntu (using the KDE Partiton Manager) but when I put on EXT3, I'm left with a drive that I cannot place or put folders on, and a lovely little 'lost+found' folder. Doing some digging, the whole drive was owned by root.


Booting into Ubuntu, using the Disk Utility, I am left with a disk that is not owned, but still leaves the lost+found folder, plus small problems, like not being able to transfer large files.

Any suggestions on how to fix?

The new behaviour is what I would expect.... the old behaviour certainly sounds wrong ( at least for a UNIX file system ). Perhaps it was formatted as FAT32?

It was identified as ext3, plus I've been able to place files on the drive larger then FAT32 could handle.

It's the whole "I die if you try and perform more then one file transfer" and the 5.35 gigs taken up by lost+found that worries me.

The 5.35 gb taken by lost+found is most unusual, especially for a newly formatted drive. It is possible that NTFS did not overwrite all of the ext3 data, hence when reformatted to ext3, the formatter was able to recover some of your data.

What I've found out so far is that lost+found is assorted data picked up from fragments left over by a white-wash format, this correct?

Now, another thing, how (and should?) I delete it?

Simply removing the contents of the folder ( assuming you don't need them ) as root should be sufficient, and is completely safe.

Oddly enough, I wasnt aware permissions were carried over to another system! I thought they were only local...

Come to think of it, the 2nd problem I've had (mutiple file transfers screwing up) seems to be Dolphin's (and whatever else transfers) fault.

bcooksley; one of these days I'm going to have to send a little thank you your way for helping me out so often

Using "kdebugdialog" to enable the "kio_file" debug zone, running an operation then checking in ~/.xsession-errors should be sufficient to tell you why it is failing.