[PLUG] Mounting USB drive

[Robbert van Andel]

Thanks for the help. I do want to preserve the data on the disk.  Is
there anyway to do this without losing the data on the drive.  I can
mount a dos floppy disk, so that shouldn't be an issue.

On Tue, 2002-11-19 at 21:24, Steven Raymond wrote:
> > I checked into the website.  According to the documentation there, my
> > machine is seeing the attached drive in /proc/bus/usb/devices.  Now I am
> > having trouble mounting it.  I have tried several different iterations
> > but keep coming up with this error /dev/<whatever> is not a valid block
> > device. Two questions arise
> >
> > 1).  What am I doing wrong.
> > 2).  Is NTFS supported?  I'm asking because I'm not sure if I have an
> > ntfs partition on this drive or fat32.
> 
> This is what I had to do to get my USB drive working:
> 
> Had to fdisk it first.  Note this will destroy any data you have on the
> drive.  While it seems that you should be able to mount an NTFS or FAT32
> partition, you'll need support for those file systems in your kernel. 
> When I compiled this kernel I thought I was smart and didn't include it. 
> Heh can't even read a dos-formatted floppy doh!
> 
> So in my machine the usb drive shows up under /dev/sda, therefore:
> fdisk /dev/sda
> Make a small partition to start out with, perhaps 1GB.  For some reason on
> my drive when I try to use make the partition fill to the drive maximum
> size, it tends to hang during fdisk and didn't even complete overnight. 
> If I make it even say just 1GB smaller than the 40GB capacity, it fdisks
> in about 5 minutes or less.
> 
> Next you have to make a filesystem.  Of course you must have the chosen
> filesystem support in your kernel.  I recommend ext3fs using the following
> command:
> mke2fs -j /dev/sda1
> Note that sda1 is the partition you just got done making in fdisk.
> 
> Finally you have to mount it.  So pick a place to mount the drive, I used
> /mnt/usbhd,
> mkdir /mnt/usbhd
> mount -t auto /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbhd/
> 
> That worked for me.  It is actually a usb2.0 hard drive that is
> bass-ackwards compatible with 1.1.  It seems to function okay, is pretty
> slow, and is subject to what appear to be strange timeouts.  However have
> found that if I am patient, the timeouts will eventually complete.
> 
> Hope this helps.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Robbert van Andel <robbert at vafam.com>
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