I'm running Fedora rel 12 (Constantine); GNome 2.28.2; kernel 2.6.32.26-175....

I have an external 2 bay USB drive caddy. I've been using it for about 2 years and one of the disks started failing, so I bought a new one.

I plugged in the new one and went to repartition with fdisk...blew existing away and wrote new. Then ran mkfs.ntfs on the 2 partitions that I created. Mounted them and away I went...restoring a bunch of data and directory structures. All was good.

Then the first reboot. Drive didn't mount per fstab entries. went into fdsisk and partitions were nonsensical. scratching my head, I noticed a brand new icon on my desktop with a USB icon that claimed a 2TB filesystem. I clicked it and found the data from my first partition. No sign of second partition. df showed this filesystem to be mounted under /media. Seems the whole drive has appeared as a single partition and been automatically mounted under media... bummer as I dont understand what happened, but I edited fstab and mounted /dev/sdd on /pcdata...based on the mount partition that was used in /media. I cant say that i'm comfortable with there not being a partition number, but maybe I'm too Unix old school. Can someone explained what is happening? It's seems to be 'hald' but I don't know why it's doing this.

Because now the other drive that was in the caddy is getting the same treatment. I really don't want to lose my other partitions. this one's been fine for a couple of years but this USB automounting functionality is making a mess. I was in the middle of an overnight huge transfer and the partition apparently unmounted (becoming unavailable and blowing my transfer out of the water) and got mounted under /media. no reboot or anything.

These two disks are my shares to all of the other systems in the house and the server for backup images.

I miss the old format command but thought fdisk was the right command to manage partition tables now...but they seem corrupt.

Thanks for any assistance getting me out of this mess and back to having my data mounted where I want it..

Were the older drives also 2TB in size? For partitions larger than 2TB you need parted and create a GUID Partition Table.

They were not 2TB...nearer 1.5TB. I also created all partitions smaller than 2TB...though maybe I was not doing it correctly.