You need to be root to do most of this.  

[ DYNAMO note: You should run these commands as operator on sci2]

To format a WD Passport drive under Linux:

Before connecting the drive, do a 'ls -l /dev/sd*', or something
similar.  You want to see what hard drives are connected to the
system, then determine what changes once you plug in the disk.

After connecting (and waiting), do 'ls -l /dev/sd*', again.  Look for
differences in the two listings, or look for a dev with a recent
timestamp.  (you can also do 'ls -lt /dev', listing the devices in
most-recent-timestamp order).

Once you know the device, do:

mke2fs -j -v -L SPOL-HDnn /dev/sdjj

(make a filesystem on the disk; create a journaling area, which sets
to ext3; show verbose output; label the disk as an SPOL-hard drive,
with the 'nn' replaced by the disk number; use the proper device name)

Then, remove the disk by simply un-plugging.  Re-plug the disk, and
wait for a pop-up window showing the mount (the window should show the
label for the disk, SPOL-HDnn).

Leave the pop-up window alone!  Different disk operations can make it
difficult to un-mount the disk.  The pop-up has a pull-down option to
unmount, and this method rarely fails.

To complete the preparation of an S-Pol disk, do something like the
following commands (actual disk/user/directory names may vary!):

cd /media/SPOL-HD43
mkdir field_data
chown operator field_data
chmod 775 field_data
touch SPOL-HD43
chmod 444 SPOL-HDnn

(I scripted these commands when I had a bunch of disks to do)


Note that there are other disk commands available, including

e2label
dumpe2fs
mkfs  is a more generic version of mke2fs