ext harddrive not found with fdisk -l /dev/sd*

henrnorl · 12-04-2006, 05:37 AM

Hello,

I have a 500 GB external harddrive with 3 partitions. Two of them are unformatted. The third is formatted with NTFS. (When partitioning in Windows it seemed to be number three in the graphical interface.)

When I connect with USB, I cannot find the harddrive on the computer.
fdisk -l /dev/hd* gives info about my internal harddrives.
fdisk -l /dev/sd* gives NO OUTPUT when 500 GB harddrive is connected.
fdisk -l /dev/sd* gives right info when my USB stick is connected.

I was able to mount the harddrive (NTFS) as /dev/sda1 before I partitioned it.

Any ideas of how I can
(1) Get contact with the harddrive
(2) Format one partition to ext3

Thanks!!

musicman_ace · 12-04-2006, 05:52 AM

Boot your system and login
Connect the USB drive
type dmesg and look at the output. It should says which device it is mapping the usb device to. Maybe your system is using something strange like /dev/uda1. I've seen some people have udev rules where USB devices show up as /dev/ud_#

henrnorl · 12-04-2006, 08:00 AM

I've restarted, plugged in the Maxtor OneTouch III harddrive through USB, and run
dmesg
This is the end of the output:

hub.c: new USB device 00:07.2-1, assigned address 2
usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0xd49/0x7212) is not claimed by any active driver.
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: Maxtor Model: OneTouch III Rev: 0343
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 976773168 512-byte hdwr sectors (500108 MB)
/dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 p3
WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured
USB Mass Storage device found at 2
USB Mass Storage support registered.

There is nothing called scsi in /dev. What next?

musicman_ace · 12-04-2006, 08:17 AM

it should be /dev/sda. The line saying "Attached scsi disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 976773168 512-byte hdwr sectors (500108 MB)"

henrnorl · 12-04-2006, 08:36 AM

I did fdisk -l /dev/s* and after a looong time I got info about the three partitions. And I could mount the NTFS partition as /dev/sda3.

Now, how do I format a partition to ext3? (/dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2)

pixellany · 12-04-2006, 09:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by henrnorl

I did fdisk -l /dev/s* and after a looong time I got info about the three partitions. And I could mount the NTFS partition as /dev/sda3.

Now, how do I format a partition to ext3? (/dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2)

mkfs.ext3

look at "man mkfs" or "man mkfs.ext3" for details