Hello,

I have three 500 GB External SATA hard drives which I use to back up my films and TV episodes. Since this often requires transfer of data exceeding 50 GB at a time, usb doesn't really cut it. I looked for an alternative and went ahead and bought a Vantec PCI-E eSATA card. Now my hard drives have eSATA connectors so it seemed like a good idea. The card I got was the UGT-ST400.

The card works fine and is detected but it isn't working the way Id like it to. If my system is booted into Kubuntu, and I plug in the external drive and plug it into the computer nothing happens. However if I boot up with the drive plugged in, then it treats it as a regular internal drive. Thats fine, except that it changes around my hard drive numbers. For example sda1, becomes sdb1 etc. This makes my system unable to boot.

What I would like to be able to to is, have the eSATA externals behave like USB drives when I plug them in. I want it to detect a new external hard drive, auto mount it and put an icon on my desktop. The I would do my back ups. After I was done transferring I would like to right click on the mounted drive and "safely remove" it and plug in another drive and do the same thing.

Is this going to be possible ?

Thanks
C.

Never messed with sata as external drives so not sure how well it will work but here goes. Download this script from here. http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/res...si-bus.sh-1.25 Save it to say /usr/bin so it can be found. it may need to have the execute attribute applied to it so run this command. ' chmod + x /usr/bin/rescan-scsi-bus.sh ' If that is what you save it as.
Now boot up as normal no drives attached.
Run command as root ' /sbin/fdisk -l ' to see what is present.
Attach the drive.
Run the rescan-scsi-bus.sh command as root.
Then run the command ' /sbin/fdisk -l ' again.

Does it appear?

If so then not sure if the hotplug service and udev features will bring up an automount gui interface like the USB drives do or not. My guess it won't but could be wrong. But if it does appear try mounting manully and see if all is stable and working. Then to unmount you may have to do other things but you can try unmounting the drive partitions and unplug. Hard to say if the system will stay running or lock up. If it locksup then I have another thing to run before unplugging but would have to find the doc on that. Lets see what will work or not.

Brian