My server does not recognize the USD external WD 120 gig drive that I have attached to the USB port. when I perform a dmesg |less it does not say what "sda" or anything. it does asy it is there, but not what ID it is?

I then followed the instructions that someone put up on this website to format it with partition magic 8.0 and then retry it, but I still get the same thing?????

Any suggestions???

Thank you.

To get my USB pen drive to work in FC3 (you should have to do the same for your USB HD)
I plugged it in then ran the Hardware Browser (hwbrowser from a terminal or in the System Tools Menu)
The pen drive showed up in the Hard Drive section - that told me that the drive was /dev/sdc

I then created a dir to mount the drive to ( I chose /mnt/pd )

then type 'mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/pd'

that mounted my pen drive

obviously change the /dev/sdc1 bit to match the result in your hwbrowser (don't forget to add the '1' after it as well)

Thank you for responding!!!

I tried running that command at my root prompt, but it said command unknown?
Could it be done as some other command?

Thanks again for your help!

OK, here is what I get when I do a fmesg:

usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 4
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 2 ports detected
usb-uhci.c: v1.275:USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver
usb.c: registered new driver hiddev
usb.c: registered new driver hid
hid-core.c: v1.8.1 Andreas Gal, Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>
hid-core.c: USB HID support drivers
mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
hub.c: new USB device 00:1d.7-2, assigned address 2
usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x1058/0x300) is not claimed by any active driver.
EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.19, 19 August 2002 on ide2(33,3), internal journal
Adding Swap: 2047744k swap-space (priority -1)
SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: WDC Model: WD1200BB-00DWA0 Rev: 15.0
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured
USB Mass Storage device found at 2
USB Mass Storage support registered.

Does this indicate where I can get my drive at /dev/sd*?

If you type

'dmesg | less'

you should see something like (below) this after plugging in the hard disk. This is the very bottom of the file

.
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 2, frame# 88
scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: EasyDisk Model: Rev: 7.77
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 256000 512-byte hdwr sectors (131 MB)
sda: sda1 <------------- Look here !!
WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured
USB Mass Storage device found at 2
USB Mass Storage support registered.

In this example it is a different linux box so the pen drive is sda1 this time.

Giving that in your example your linux box sees the drive but doesn't auto config it you may have to type 'modprobe usb-uhci' and then 'dmesg | less'

Thank you that did the trick!!!
sda1!!!

So now, all I have to do is create the directory that I want to mount it on, and then mount it?

Thanks again for the help SkunkBurner!!!

Oh by the way, since I formatted this drive as ext3, if the Linux box goes south on me, does this mean I can only retrieve the data off of my external backup from another linux box?

S'Cool

You can use a WIndoze box to recover data if you have Partition Magic or something similar - that recognises ext2/3 partitions.

Skunkburner

Thank you for all the help, will let you know how I made out...

OK, everything is correctly. I will go through the whole process just in case someone else wants to do the external backup.

I am using Redhat 9.0 with version 2.4.20-8

A Western Digital External USB 2.0 Hard Drive, 120 Gigabyte

The first thing I did was use Partition Magic 8.0 on our Windows 2000 box to format in ext3.

I then did the following steps on our Linux server:

1. modprobe usb-uhci
2. dmesg | less
3. In my case the USB drive was found on /dev/sda1
4. mkdir /mnt/backup
5. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/backup

Start backing up....