Hey guys,

Please excuse my ignorance, as I am fairly new to the Linux world. I have a few web servers that I am maintaining (CentOS 4.4), and their backup they have in place now (using ftp unsecurely) seems a little unorthodox and insufficient, so I am trying to implement something a little simpler by attaching a 500gig external hd to each machine, but heres my problem...
I attached the drive, and on the screen it tells me...


Vendor: STECH Model: Simple Drive Rev: 8.59
SCSI device sdb: 976773167 512-byte hdwr sectors (500108 MB)
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
FAT: invalid media value (0xb9)



Even though it showed me on the screen all of that stuff, I used the fsdisk -l command... Check it out below...


Disk /dev/sda: 122.9 GB, 122941276160 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14946 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 14946 119949322+ 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107861504 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 60801 488384001 7 HPFS/NTFS



Then, now that I am positive of the drive I am trying to mount (sdb), I try to mount the drive... Below is the output...


[root@host ~]# mkdir /mnt/usbdrive
[root@host ~]# mount /dev/sdb /mnt/usbdrive
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
[root@host ~]# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usbdrive
mount: fs type ntfs not supported by kernel


As you can see, I am a little confused... When specifying sdb as the drive to mount, it tells me a must specify a filesystem type (like it doesn't recognize the filesystem type), but when I try sdb1, even though this actually isn't the drive I am trying to mount (just testing) it tells me ntfs not supported (I could have swore that ntfs WAS supported).
Very simply, I need to get this drive to work one way or another. Any help would be great. Thanks!

PS... Thinking it may have been that drive in itself, I installed a Fantom external HD and am still getting the exact same problem...

Well, you may not have the NTFS support in your kernel. You can try to manually specify the NTFS file system type (do a "man mount", and check out the -t option), and see if that works. The /dev/sdb1 is the correct device to try to mount, though.

If it was me, though, and this was for a linux-only system, I'd just reformat the drive as ext2 or ext3. You'll get better speed out of it too, with less overhead for the NTFS support that you only need for that one filesystem.

Okay, just reformatted to ext3 and mounted... Thanks!

NP, glad it worked for you. There are utilities to let you mount ext2/3 partitions under Windows, too, should the need arise.

EDIT: Also, put a sticker on the drive, saying it's formatted with that filesystem type. Otherwise, if you plug it into a Windows box, it'll say it can't read the drive...would you like to format it? Which would be bad on a drive where you had data...

No need for the sticker, the drive isn't going anywhere If you would, I could still use some more help though, but I posted it in a new thread. Check it out, I think u could help... http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...4/#post3292645
Thanks