Hi, I have an External USB Hard Drive, 320GB partitioned into 2 equal parts. I am running SUSE 10.1, I have USB ports on the back panel, also on the front of the box, is it best to plug the USB HDD into the front or the back ports. Would you explain in simple steps how to mount this drive, then to access the drive for data transfer. Windows automaticly recognises it, but linux does not. Thanks.

No problem:

So first you plug the HDD someplace (into the computer) - preferably something that looks like a USB port.

If you have no other stuff connected to your serial ports the linux kernel will automatically notice the newcommer and create a block device for it. It will be something like /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb2.

the a or b after the /dev/sd stands for the port, the number for the partition. I don't know the configs of your system, so it might also be /dev/sdd1.

Open a console as root (or su) and then type
"mount /dev/sda1 /mount/usb_hdd", substituting the paths as necessary.

The first parameter to mount is which block device you want to mount, the second parameter is where in your filesystem it will be mounted. There are tons of other parameters, like type or encryption. Usually however the mount command will run through all known filessystem types to indentify the one you want to mount automatically.

More details about the mount utility can be found in the manpage (type "man mount") or visit this link

The difference on the front and back may or may not differ. I have seen machines with USB 1.0-1.1 posts on the front and 2.0 USB ports on the back. And vice-a-versa. Manual should say what is what. Version 1.0-1.1 is 12mbps and Version 2.0 is 480mbps.

I do not know how Suse if it can automatically see USB drives and automount them.

To see if the system sees it is after you plug in the USB drive wait 10 secs. Type the command ' dmesg ' and see what it says. If no other scsi, sata, USB, Firewire, or a few other type of drives are on the system then it will usually be seen as /dev/sda. The first primary partition will be /dev/sda1 and second will be /dev/sda2. If the second partition is a logical partition in an entended partition it will be /dev/sda5

Post output from the following commands.
cat /etc/fstab
cat /proc/scsi/scsi
/sbin/lsusb
/sbin/lsmod
/sbin/lspci
/sbin/fdisk -l ( must be run as root to use )

So lets first see the last 20 lines of dmesg before going on. No sense getting ahead if the system cannot see it.

Thanks Brian1 & ichrispa, I'll try those & get back to you.