I was wondering if ubuntu will recognize and auto-mount my 160gb firewire hard drive made by SimpleTech.

cant answer that one ,it seem though that people have some issues with usb devices ,
but as a whole they seem to be able to get them to work,
plug it in and see if it works ,if not search the forums ,and google,and find the solution .
or post back here and we will try to help..

Hope this helps.

I've just plugged my Lacie d2 160Gb firewire hard drive into my Ubuntu laptop & that has worked without problems.

All I had to do was plug it in, switch it on, wait a few seconds and a browser window was opened listing the contents of the drive.

It is formatted as FAT32 and I haven't had any problems with it, I can read from it, delete files from it and copy files to it.

Hope thats of some use to you.

Sounds good, especially cause I haven't heard of Lacie (meaning its probably not to popular). If yours works, mine wil probably.

Prolly slightly irrelevant, but I plugged a spare 80gig hard drive I had, into one of those external USB enclosures you can get just about anywhere.

After I formatted it in ext3, Ubuntu recognizes it w/o issue.

IGF

I have a LaCie (a very popular, industry standards leading manufacturer) external 500G Multiport on firewire 400 (it has 2 firewire 800 ports, one firewire 400 port and one usb 2.0 port) but this sucker doesn't get picked up "automagically"... - Could be the host adapter isn't recognized either though, haven't dug into it yet. I'm just looking to see if I can run a Mondo B/U to it from an Ubuntu LiveCD.

Trying it on USB 2.0 from a "native" (motherboard) port..........
Success!

I'm guessing the extra firewire host adapter I added to my system (under Winblowz) just isn't recognized by the LiveCD. - If that were ok, it probably would've been there right off the bat.

Mondo will probably work like a champ now and since the machine that actually needs backed up doesn't have any extra cards like that it'll probably go smooth as silk there.


Bottom line: As long as your host adapater is installed properly you'll probably be good to go. - If you have problems that might be a good starting point for troubleshooting.

Norm