[PLUG] Detecting Drive in USB IDE Enclosure

[Richard C. Steffens]

I bought an Nspire OT352 at ENU. It was $3 more than the generic one
discussed yesterday, but has ventilation slots, which the $27 unit did
not have. It's simple to install the hardware. Now, how do I make Linux
use it?

I connected it to my SuSE 10.1 box hoping to have some automagical thing
happen and I'd be able to see the drive. Sadly, nothing appeared to
happen. I tried two other drives with similar results. I found a web
site discussing using a similar device on a SuSE system. It recommended
looking at dmesg for hints as to where the drive is in the system.

As they are rather lengthy (for e-mail, anyway) the results for each of
the three drives are found here:

Seagate ST313021A, 13 GB
  http://home.comcast.net/~rsteff/USB-drive/seagate.html

Maxtor 84320D4, 4.3 GB
  http://home.comcast.net/~rsteff/USB-drive/maxtor.html

Western Digital 26400, 6.4 GB
  http://home.comcast.net/~rsteff/USB-drive/wd.html

The steps used in collecting the data were as follows:

1. Install the hardware and connect power and USB cables.
2. Turn on USB enclosure power.
3. Run dmesg -c > (a suitable filename)
4. Turn off USB enclosure power.
5. Run dmesg -c > (another suitable filename)

Note that the dmesg pages for the Seagate and Maxtor drives were
obtained after powering up the USB drive enclosure, step 3. Step 5
returned an empty page. However, the opposite was true for the Western
Digital: an empty page was returned in step 3, and the page given in the
link, above, was returned in step 5.

I have connected the USB enclosure with the Maxtor drive to my XP
laptop, and can see the three partitions of the old Win98 file system
installed on it.

XP sees the Seagate drive and properly identifies the model, but doesn't
recognize the two partitions on it, Linux swap and a Slackware 11.0
installation.

XP doesn't see the Western Digital drive, but the USB enclosure's pilot
light blinks about once every 30 seconds, which it does not do with
either of the other drives installed.

What do I need to know about to troubleshoot this?

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens