Hi All (first time poster)

Using Slackware v10.2 on an older box...and am sort of a newbie. Have attached a Hitachi 100GB external USB HD. Then:

1) ran modprobe usb-storage
2) ran lsmod to confirm that usb-storage is present
3) cfdisk /dev/sda shows a partition named sda1 with 100GB of free space.
4) mounted the drive: mount /dev/sda1 /root/big (saved a test file)
5) df shows /dev/sda1 with only 16,334Kb

Capacity of the new HD partition seems to have shrunk from 100GB to 16MB. What am I missing?

Thanks in advance.

sanderso

Ummm are you sure there isn't a jumper on the HD that limits it to 16 GB of space? Other then that, I have no clue

Depending on the age of the machine that external drive may just not work. You might try partitioning it, and formatting, or erase all the files on the drive. How big is your test file?

Could be anything , even ur bios , older bios cant detect larger harddisks

Thanks to all for your input/thoughts.

The machine & bios isn't THAT old...the IDE HD currently in the box is 60B (if I recall correctly...am not at the box as I type this), so I would think that if it were a bios problem, it would limit the new drive to something in the 60GB size, or maybe the 16GB size not 16MB size (that's MB not GB).

The test file was very small...as in less than 1K. Of note however, is that after mounting /root/big that there were a number of files (maybe 50+ files and several subdirectories) already in the folder. If fact, df showed that only 70+% of /dev/sda1 was available. Since I'm sort of new at all this, I figured these were system files which are always present in the root of a mounted directory.

sanderso

That's a little weird if there are files on a new hard drive. There normally aren't any files on a new drive. You may try partitioning and formatting the drive. Linux's all have a partition and format tool. Or, you may prefer to use cfdisk to partition, and mk2fs to make an ext3 file system, which is formatting. If the drive isn't new, from a retailer, someone might have dd'ed a flash memory card to it which would make the drive the same size as the flash memory card. In this case you would just repartition and format.

The drive is a preformated HD designed to be an upgrade for a WinDoze laptop. I suppose it's very likely that the files were previously put on the HD given it's purpose.

I think the step I haven't taken is to do mk2fs to format the partition. The partition definition seems to ID the full size of the disk correctly, but at no time had I actually done a format. I'll try formating the partition using mk2fs...then provide feedback to this thread.

Thanks again for your help.

sanderso

I dont know if you already formatted and repartitioned, and maybe you have already thought of this, but I thought I would add it anyway.

Perhaps it has more than one partition. Sometimes there is a partition on their that runs software associated with the drive (drivetools) and a second partition is the free space on the drive. Maybe you need to mount /dev/sda2

Was able to format /dev/sda1 using mke2fs ('e' omitted in thread above). Mounted the drive to /root/big. df shows 96GB. Success!
Thanks all!
sanderso