How to use virgin Lacie firewire drive (mounting an unformatted disk)
 

I have just got a Lacie d2 Harddrive Extreme that I would like to use with Slack10 and firewire 400. The drive has never seen any computer before, so no MBR. How do I go about accessing the drive? I've put an entry in my fstab as follows:

/dev/sda2 /mnt/fire vfat noauto,user.rw 0 0

but I'm hashing that from a line I used to get a Disgo working. Obviously vfat is wrong as there is no file system on the drive. Also I've used /dev/sda2 as my usb ports seem to be on sda1, sdb1 etc. All my usb and firewire ports are on the motherboard that the manufacturer said was 100% linux compliant, which it has been so far.

How do I start, if I can't mount I can't format?

Thanks

I've made some progress. After changing my fstab to the following:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/fire vfat noauto,user.rw 0 0

I get the following when I type 'mount /mnt/fire'

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, or too many mounted file systems

So I guess it's seeing it now, but throwing it out as it's just a blank HDD. Does anyone know how to format a mounted drive? It seems like a catch 22, you can't format until you mount and you can't mount unless formatted.