I am seriously looking at the archos mp3 player/usb portable hard drive, i have been for about 1.5 years but I'm too cheep . has anyone successfully got this to mount and function correctly? i see lots of questions being asked here about problems people are having when trying to mount the archos but i don't see any complete success stories yet.

thanks,
AD

Yes; I've got an Archos Jukebox Multimedia 20 and it works perfectly under Linux (Debian Woody with a 2.4.20 kernel).

Just make sure you have USB kernel support working, make sure (as I initially forgot to) that you're loading the _right_ USB drivers (UHCI/OHCI/EHCI) and make sure you've installed hotswap, and then hook up the archos. When you turn it on, it should appear in /dev/sda#. Mount that in whatever directory you like as a vfat filesystem and treat it like a removable hard drive.

I put the mount info in /etc/fstab; hotswap detects it when I hook it up and turn it on, GKrellM will mount and unmount it with a click (and I suppose window managers with similar functionality would have no problem doing the same thing from, say, a desktop icon) and when I want to remove it, I make sure it's unmounted and turn it off; hotswap cleans up after me. It's simple, transparent, and works more reliably under Linux than it does under Windows.

great -- thanks for your reply Jaka!