All:

I am trying to get our linux machines to recognize a new Western Digital My Book 1TB external drive. We are running the CentOS 4.4 distribution on Dell PCs. From what I can tell, the enclosure houses two separate 500GB drives. The drive is formatted as an NTFS RAID0 disk. When we plug it in via USB, I see the following when running 'dmesg'

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scsi7 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: WD Model: My Book Device Rev: 104a
Type: Enclosure ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi generic sg1 at scsi7, channel 0, id 0, lun 0, type 13
USB Mass Storage device found at 12
input: USB HID v1.11 Device [Western Digital My Book] on usb-0000:00:1f.2-1
===============

So it looks like the machine sees the drive at /dev/sg1... but the problem is that the SCSI system is not mapping sg1 to sda, sdb, etc. Therefore, if I try to do an 'fdisk /dev/sd*' it just says that it cannot open the disk.

I found this site: http://linu.gs/misc/remember/wd-mybook-1TB-on-linux.php --- but it didn't help my problems any. We tried reformatting as RAID1 and still couldn't get the linux machine to map the device so we could reformat as ext3.

Any ideas? Anyone else have similar problems? Anyone else think this could be a RAID problem? I have never before had any problems with WD My Book external drives formatted as NTFS. I can always see them in fdisk and reformat them for ext3... not so with this drive.

BTW... I purhased a Fantom Drives external 1TB drive and it is awesome! Works like a charm and is pretty quiet, too. For what it's worth... I do not like WD products.

Thanks,

Bret

Hello I am having the same problem with a WD 1TB drive, but with further investigation i learned that the reason it is showing up as sg1 devices and not as sda, sdb, sdc, etc... is because of the physical build of the HD. If you take the HD apart you will notice there is a USB hub inside the drive and connected to that Hub is the USB Mass storage device, ie the drives, and the button on the front (you are probably asking yourself, WTH?!, i did too) but if you crack open the owners manual, *SHOCK*, you will notice that the button on the front not only toggles the power but is in fact an input device that you can program commands to. If you actually installed the software that comes with the drive you can program that button to trigger different applications. This is definitely the most retarded thing i have seen from WD thus far. So the only foreseeable way to get this drive to work is to take the thing apart and somehow connect the drives to your Linux device. I could be wrong, but i spent a hell of a long time trying to get that drive to mount.

If you have a lot of data that you need to move to and from these machines use PSCP on a Windows machine, that way you can push out or pull files off these machines.

Mine is a single drive and has been formatted as a big ext3 partition.
I used GNOME Partition Editor.

If someone is looking for a drive along these lines, I can now recommend :
- Western Digital WDH1CS10000N My Book Home Edition 1 TB USB/Firewire/eSATA External Hard Drive

# fdisk -l /dev/sdd
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Disk /dev/sdd: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 1 121601 976760001 83 Linux
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# dmesg
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[14728.068000] usb 5-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 13
[14728.340000] usb 5-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[14728.372000] scsi8 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[14728.372000] usb-storage: device found at 13
[14728.372000] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[14728.440000] input: Western Digital My Book as /class/input/input12
[14728.440000] input: USB HID v1.11 Device [Western Digital My Book] on usb-0000:00:1d.7-2
[14733.400000] usb-storage: device scan complete
[14733.416000] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD My Book 1016 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
[14733.440000] SCSI device sdd: 1953525168 512-byte hdwr sectors (1000205 MB)
[14733.452000] sdd: Write Protect is off
[14733.452000] sdd: Mode Sense: 10 00 00 00
[14733.452000] sdd: assuming drive cache: write through
[14733.472000] SCSI device sdd: 1953525168 512-byte hdwr sectors (1000205 MB)
[14733.488000] sdd: Write Protect is off
[14733.488000] sdd: Mode Sense: 10 00 00 00
[14733.488000] sdd: assuming drive cache: write through
[14733.488000] sdd: sdd1
[14733.508000] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sdd
[14733.508000] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
[14733.800000] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
[14733.800000] EXT3 FS on sdd1, internal journal
[14733.800000] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
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