[Sussex] external hard drives - much confusion.

[Steven Dobson]

John, Colin

On Sat, 2006-11-04 at 17:46 +0000, Colin Tuckley wrote:
> John D. wrote:
> Depending on which distro you are running it may get auto mounted. Take a
> look in /etc/mtab and see if the drive mentioned in /var/log/messages has
> been mounted, if not then try adding a line like:
> 
> /dev/sda1      /media/usbdrive vfat    rw,users,noauto  0       0
> 
> to /etc/fstab

No don't do this.  Not for a USB attach device.  MSDOS file systems (pre
NTFS I believe) do not support hot removal even if the hardware does.
There is lots of pages on the WEB about this with USB key drives.

Before unpluging a MSDOS filesystem device you should first unmount it
or you could lose file system integerty.  Personally I would do that
anyway becuase just unplugging a device risks data loss.

> > Can anyone advise me, as to how I might get this working ?

My bet would be that the drive is as yet unformatted, and therefore the
automounter can't mount is because there is nothing to mount.  You need
to format it.

If you're going to use it on a duel boot system then I would suggest
formatting it under Windows.

If it is only to be used with Linux then you might want to first
partition it.  Take a look in /var/log/messages to find out what the
device name is (I'll assume /dev/sda[1] like Colin - Note if you're
using SATA disk then these also come up on the SCSI disk interface as
the first SATA driver will be /dev/sda so do check) and then:

   # cfdisk /dev/sda

to partition the disk.  And then 

   # mkfs -V -t ext3 /dev/sda1

You'll need to run mkfs for each partition you create.

> Alternatively bring it to the BCF tomorrow and we can try to sort it out.

I'll be there so do bring it along.

Hope this helps
Steve

[1]

The name can be broken down thus:

    sd[a-z][1-99]

    sd   - SCSI disk  (The driver's name)
    a-z  - The "number" of the disk.  'a' is the first disk, 'b' the
            second and so on, and
    1-99 - The partition number.

You'll get a different file in /dev for the whole disk (/dev/sda) and
then a set of files with number, one for each partition.