setting up USB hard drive in fedora

tebucky · 02-20-2006, 07:48 AM

I just bought a 300gb maxtor drive that I want to pop into a USB enclosure case and hook it up to my fedora box via USB. The end goal is to format the drive and have it be mounted on the linux box then be able to share it over Samba with my Windows machines. Can anyone provide help with this or point me to a solid tutorial??

TIA

macemoneta · 02-20-2006, 09:05 AM

Current Fedora should automatically recognize the drive when you plug it in, and create an icon on the desktop. The drive is probably formatted with VFAT, as multiple partitions. To convert it to a Linux native filesystem the steps are:

1. Unmount the drive (right click the icon, and click on eject)

2. fdisk the drive to delete the existing partitions and add a single large new one as a Linux partition (type 83)

3. Format the drive as ext2 or ext3 (for example):

For ext2: mke2fs -m 0 /dev/sda1
For ext3: mke2fs -m 0 -j /dev/sda1

4. Unplug the device, and plug it back in to mount the new partition

There are man pages for each command, but if you have a question on a specific step, let us know.

tebucky · 02-20-2006, 02:14 PM

it is connected (i think) but I do not have any icon on my desktop. I'm assuming that this is the device?

brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 Feb 20 09:46 sda

macemoneta · 02-20-2006, 05:00 PM

It's likely that is the correct device, but check the output of dmesg, or your /var/log/messages when you plug it in. You should see something like:

Code:

kernel:   Vendor: BELKIN    Model: USB 2 HS-SD/MMC   Rev: 1.29
kernel:   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
kernel: SCSI device sdd: 28800 512-byte hdwr sectors (15
MB)
kernel: sdd: Write Protect is off
kernel: sdd: assuming drive cache: write through
kernel: SCSI device sdd: 28800 512-byte hdwr sectors (15
MB)
kernel: sdd: Write Protect is off

In the above example, the device is at /dev/sdd. If you are not seeing this, then either you are not current on your maintenance (as root: yum -y update), or your enclosure chipset is incompatible.