hello,

i am interested in a usb backup solution for os x, linux, and windows.

i am curious about usb drive enclosures, if i am correct they only abstract out the usb interface and act just like internal drives?

i would like a dual-layer dvd burner with lightscribe and full linux support if that is possible, and if internal is significantly cheaper i will buy a 5.25" enclosure for it and use it for hard disks also when necessary. otherwise an external will do and i will get a cheap enclosure.

all my os's have usb 2.0 support, eg. linux 2.6 kernel. is there any brand/type guaranteed to work?

right now all i have is old drives, 200g max. i don't know sata/raid or any new advanced features. are there enclosures with features such as this i should be aware of if i buy a new system or better drives?

also any comment on firewire would be appreciated.

thanks, stairway

The best way to buy hardware for linux is to look at what is available in the stores (with features/price/availablility etc you like) then look them up (google, HCL, etc) before asking advise. However, I was curious to find out what "lightscribe" was... googling... wow. This seems to be supporting linux nicely.

I am using an ide hard drive ina sleeve right now, as a backup device no less.
Note: it acts like an external usb drive. Only much much noisier, and requires it's own PSU (hogging power-board real-estate).

The (low-end - $NZ40) sleeve I use supports IDE and SATA... and this functionality was written on the box. I had trouble finding one for sale so cheap though.

The HDD enclosure I have will not allow me to use a media drive ... it's closed at the front.

Firewire is well supported. (I have notes here for firewire in RH9 ... things are bound to be even better now.)

... 200g ?! Your drive weighs 200 grams?!

yes, 200g and 200gb, beat that!

i just bought a 500gb usb drive, tried to back up to it a la "dd of=/dev/sda" a couple of times, and after 1 or 2 failed attempts it was already failing before writing 10mb. one or two more and fdisk couldn't read it, cfdisk, nothing. plugged it into windows and i couldn't see/format it there either.

now i have this 160 gb drive, fdisk, etc. couldn't read it. i plugged it into windows, and it appeared with a serial number for a maxtor 200gb. i goodled it, retailers said it was 200gb. then it said it was installing drivers or something, and then it appeared as a 'comcast' (or something like that, but the company makes drives they are in future shop mine looks identical but was sold in best buy under the name zdata). i plugged it back into linux and i can back up w/ dd no problems.

i am wondering exactly what happened, is there a custom partition for the usb software, and are they using software to turn a 200gb drive into a 160gb external, or did windows just read the wrong serial number? and is it common to have to activate these drives in windows.. i guess the other one was fried..

the reason i was interested is when linux supports an enclosure device, does that mean that all eide functionality is supported for eide drives? all i want really is an external lightscribe dual layer burner. but the enclosure and an internal would be just as nice, perhaps more useful.

It's intriguing - made-for-usb devices usually have a single logical partition (say sda4 is extended and sda5 is vfat and lives inside sda4). Some will contain a small partition for firmware or as a recovery or for no reason. I have seen a new usb drive with s single vfat partition occupying half the drive and the rest empty!

Of course, windows has trouble with large fat32 partitions.

An IDE HDD in an IDE-USB enclosure works like a usb device. It does not work like an IDE device. (Or more accurately - it works like an SCSI device.)

I'm not sure how to go about testing yours.
Mine is the 60GiB drive which was in my old desktop (RIP)... it is formatted ext3. The drive automounted happily.

I guess you could try other tools for checking it out - like parted.

Pedants corner:
Ahh... 200GB or 200,000,000,000 bytes (Gb = giga-bit) - but it can also be shorthand for 200GiB or 200x1024x1024x1024 = 214,748,364,800 bytes.
Most folk avoid confusion by using the shorthand: "gig"

"gb" = "gram.bar" in the SI system of units. This unit has dementions: M^2.L^3/T^2 . Such an weird unit may be found in a constant of proportionality.

so i am curious enough to open mine now. i can't, i am using it to recover files from an hfs+ fs i dd'd to it using netcat.

the thing is it originally showed up in windows as a 200GB maxtor ide. when i open it in parted, it shows 3 partitions at /dev/sda1: a hidden .03 mb partition, a free 128mb, and a ~115GB. at /dev/sda3 is a hidden hfs+ partition of 37.14GB.

i am guessing the other wacky partitions are something to do with bsd partitioning of the slice hfs+ lives on. i simply did a dd from one disk to the other, ie. didn't reference partitions or slices.

the screws are showing on this bad boy some i'll have at them when i can. i want to know if its a 200GB in there and if i can get it to show up..

..i was thinking though, it installs drivers to windows. maybe they live on a little partition, and the manufacturer has different sizes. if the drive volume label was copied when they copied the image including the driver partition to their different models, maybe that explains why windows displayed the serial number for the larger drive. they could just have one image for all the different sizes. if thats the case i won't know, i removed all the partitions when i got it to work with linux.

but then how come fdisk couldn't read it until after i had fired it up in windows? i hope i won't have problems using this with another windows machine in the future..

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I am curious as to why you feel you need to back up the entire drive, OS and all. Surely all you need is to back up important user data and maybe programs that cannot be downloaded from the web anymore? Everything else could be installed from your disks or from the web.

Also, keep in mind that if you are using dd to copy the disk, you cannot be using the disk for anything else. Trying to get a static copy of something that is constantly changing is a, as this bubba sez, "ner pa!"

Also, if you partition a large backup drive into smaller (32 gig) FAT32 slices, you can put various back-ups of your hard disk into each partition and make sure that a Windows computer can access them.

Moxieman

i am attempting to recover ~270MB of deleted files from an hfs+ partition on an ibook with a single hard drive. the only way to recover seems to be os x tools. i am accessing a copy of the drive image on an external usb drive.

o, i don't want to access this data from windows. i just wondered what the reason was that the drive was initially unavailable from linux and windows till windows detected and "installed" drivers. (installed where? on the windows machine?) but linux can now access the drive. the windows machine can too. i just wondered if a 2nd windows machine will "see" it.

There may have been trouble with very large fat32 partitions... but your comments are a definite puzzle.

I purchased mu drive and enclosure seperate. The drive was unformatted when purchased. When it went into the enclosure it had two ext3 partitions (root and home - boot and swap lived on a different drive) from a defunct ubuntu installation. I repartitioned to create a more useful structure.

You sound like your setup was purchased that way.

When you plugged it into a win machine, win says it is installing drivers? Win is not connected to a network in any way? Possibly the drivers are in the disk - of windows expects to find drivers in the disk and put them there? Never heard of this before - the whole setup smells.

no simon,

i purchased the external 160GB preassembled. the disadvantage is that i can't pick the hdd itself or the enclosure, the bonus is i had a full 14 days to test it and take it back to best buy no questions asked.

it is a 160GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 PATA133 HDD.
Model: 6L160P0

so when windows reported the serial number of the 200GB Maxtor, it was an error or related to the data originally on the drive as i had thought.