nightmare USB hard drive problem
 

Hi! I'm trying to get a USB hard drive to work in Linux. It's a Transcend 20 GB model. The drive is recognized and I can read/write files to it, but Linux underestimates the capacity and this is really annoying! It's a single, FAT32 partition and it works fine in Windows.

all replies gratefully received.

thanks,

Richard

Here's the output from dmesg:

Vendor: StoreJet Model: StoreJet Rev: tor
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
SCSI device sdb: 39069824 512-byte hdwr sectors (20004 MB)
sdb: Write Protect is off
sdb: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
sdb:<6>Device sdb not ready.
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 0
unable to read partition table
Attached scsi removable disk sdb at scsi6, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
USB Mass Storage device found at 5
usb 1-6: USB disconnect, address 5
usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using address 6
scsi7 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices

What exactly is your problem?
I guess you are able to mount your HDD in linux.
From the output you present it looks like linux gets the HDD size perfectly.
So where do the problems start?

The problem is that linux thinks the drive is full! But it's not! :-(

Here's the output from df:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
190039788 53944524 126441812 30% /
/dev/sda1 101086 12447 83420 13% /boot
none 1036688 0 1036688 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1 19521504 19486624 34880 100% /media/usbdisk1

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Richard

maybe it wasn't mounted a read write, you get that sort of output when you mount a cd or dvd, even if it is appendable.

was definitely mounted read/write as small files can be copied over successfully.

any more ideas?

Thanks,

Richard

Post the output of "fdisk -l"

thanks for the reply and sorry the delay in responding. here's the output

===
[awuser@E70249 sbin]$ ./fdisk -l /dev/sdb1
Cannot open /dev/sdb1
[awuser@E70249 sbin]$ ./fdisk -l /media/usbdisk1
last_lba(): I don't know how to handle files with mode 41ed
===

doesn't mean much to me! :-(

Thanks,

Richard

I asked the output of "fdisk -l" and you have tried to do something like "fdisk -l /dev/sdb1" !!
/dev/sdb1 is the first partition on /dev/sdb and hence does not contain a partition table nor MBR !! If it is not clear to you, /dev/sdb is the device file that represents the entire disk and /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdb2... stand for partitions 1, 2... etc.

Either, try to get the output of "fdisk -l" or "fdisk -l /dev/sdb" and post the output here.

Running "fdisk -l /media/usbdisk1" gets you nothing as /media/usbdisk1 is not a device special file !! It is a mountpoint where /dev/sdb1 should be mounted if that is the way your system is configured.