Thanks for the advice!
I first installed Virtual Box. Then Ubuntu 14.04.2 (the latest), along with the Extension Pack and the Guest Additions. The Ubuntu guest OS was unable to read the USB drive in the Disks utility (the standard for formatting) or in the gparted application I downloaded and installed. When I open Terminal and enter sudo fdisk -l it doesn't show up. However, it does show up in the little USB icon menu at the bottom of the primary Ubuntu window (First it shows in black text, then if I click on it, it gets a little check next to it – but still doesn't mount, and still can't manage to format it).
After about 5 hours of trying various other things, including reading everything online I could understand, I decided to try Paragon ExtFS, the Mac OS program that allows you to format Ext3. However, it doesn't support the 128kb inode size I need :-/
I wrote Paragon and they recommended the following:
"
you can easily change formatting settings by using a command line.
To change inode sizes (standard is 256), do the following steps:
1. Install HomeBrew Software (http://brew.sh/): open terminal and type in the following:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homeb … /install)”
During the installation software will ask for downloading additional components.
2. This command will download and install e2fsprogs:
brew install e2fsprogs
3. To create ExtFS with custom inode size:
/usr/local/Cellar/e2fsprogs/1.42.11/sbin/mkfs.ext2 -i device mkfs.ext3 and mkfs.ext4 is also available
"
I tried the following, and got the following error:
Woven-Path:~ Tiroteo$ /usr/local/Cellar/e2fsprogs/1.42.11/sbin/mkfs.ext3 -i ME_DCP mkfs.ext3: invalid inode ratio ME_DCP (min 1024/max 67108864)
Now, I'm at a loss :'-(
I did some more research, and my next guess is I could type the following:
/usr/local/Cellar/e2fsprogs/1.42.11/sbin/mkfs.ext3 -i 128 /dev/disk1s1
I got the name of the disk from Disk Utility – not sure if that's correct, especially since that seems to be a partition name and not the entire disk name. Is that right?? Would that format my entire drive to Ext3 with an inode of 128Kb? And that allow me to place my DCP files at the root level of Partition 0? I'm a bit confused about how to name the drive.
And then I'm hoping that from there I will be able to use Paragon ExtFS to simply copy my files to the drive... Sorry if these are obvious, I'm a total noob with all this.
Many thanks for any guidance you might be able to give!