1394 External Hard Drive
 

I can only sometimes see my external hard drive, and can never mount it. When
I can see it, I get the error message:

mount: bad fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1 or to many mounted file systems

Running as root, fdisk -l doesn't show it either, though it does show three
linux drives and a windows drive.
I went ahead and tried to mount it anyway; I created a shared directory in
/mnt, and then edited /etc/fstab by adding the following line:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/shared ntfs ro,auto,vid=1000,gid=1000,vmask=0000 0 0

followed immediatly by a mount -a. It then returns either /dev/sda1 does not
exist (when the drive is unplugged; unsurprising) or bad mount point. I also
tried changing the files system to auto, but that didn't help (bad mount
point again). The drive is a Maxtor OneTouch II 250 Gb, formatted into ntfs,
connected through 1394.
Thanks in advance.

I haven't tried 1394 with mandrake, but have had good results with USB & mandrake 10.1 official, BUT I had to install a shedload of "updates" via urpmi before it would work at all properly.

So, first question, have you updated your installation since installing from DVD /CD? If not, then you should, and I hope you have DSL as it was about 550MB and took a couple of hours.

Sometimes, plugging the drive in, logging out, then logging back in seems to encourage mandrake / KDE to sort itself out.

Hope this helps.

No, but thank you, I'll give both a try. Running a cable to my computer is extremely inconvenient, so since I gave up on the hard drive I've been trying to get ndiswrapper to be happy with the god forsaken Broadcom 94306 chipset. Right now I'm downloading every webpage I think might be applicable in windows and then rebooting again each time, so I've not updated yet, but I was hoping there would be an easy fix. We'll see if USB makes it happier.