mounting a usb hard drive

yocompia · 10-19-2003, 02:03 PM

my buddy has an external usb hard drive and we just installed linux on his laptop. i'm having trouble finding out how to mount this drive so he can access it, and i don't know which modules are required to do this.

if somebody could tell me which modules i need to insert and the syntax for the mounting, i would be grateful. in the meantime, i'll try to figure out which modules are neccessary by rebooting and letting the plug-n-play load the modules and try doing detective work from there.

thx for reading,
y-p

quatsch · 10-19-2003, 02:08 PM

The modules might get loaded automatically once you plugin the device. See if the USB drive appears in the output of
fdisk -l

The USB drive will appear as a scsi device. In my case, it's
/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc

If it does appear, the partitions on it should be /dev/sdaX, or /dev/sdbX where X is the partition number. You can then mount the partitions using these device names.

emilryge · 10-19-2003, 02:11 PM

Try to look in /var/log/messages. Thats what I do when i need to figure out, where my usb storage key is located.

- Emil

yocompia · 10-19-2003, 02:20 PM

ok, i tried the "#fdisk -l" and only the on-board hard drive came up. then i checked the messages log and i found the following 2 entries:

Oct 19 13:24:25 shitbox kernel: hub.c: new USB device 00:01.2-2, assigned address 2
Oct 19 13:24:29 shitbox /etc/hotplug/usb.agent: ... no modules for USB product 67b/2307/100

does this mean that this usb drive is not linux compatible? got any more suggestions?

quatsch · 10-19-2003, 02:23 PM

try
modprobe usb-storage
(as root). This is the module used for usb harddrives. And see if it now appears in the output of fdisk -l

yocompia · 10-19-2003, 02:31 PM

tried it, and still no dice. i got the following in /var/log/messages (which is encouraging):

Oct 19 14:20:46 shitbox kernel: Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
Oct 19 14:20:46 shitbox kernel: usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
Oct 19 14:20:46 shitbox kernel: USB Mass Storage support registered.

it's also notable that my lsmod has the usbcore used, but neither the uhci or the usb-storage appear to be used:

usb-storage 65568 0 (unused)
...
uhci 24528 0 (unused)
usbcore 58400 2 [usb-storage uhci]

i'll try just rebooting it now, to see if that fixes anything. thx for the quick replies.