I've got a Maxtor 5000LE 80GB external HD connected to my PC through USB.. can I access this through Linux? Also I'm having a some issues with burning CDs, I've got an SCSI CD-RW and I would like to know how to burn with it does anybody have a good, slow stepping tutorial or could maybe someone give me a hand?

I've used the following steps to archive a directory tree to CD :

1.) # /usr/bin/mkisofs -pad -R -T -v -o cdrom.iso <srcdir>
2.) # mount cdrom.iso -r -t iso9660 -o loop /mnt/testiso
3.) # cdrecord -v speed=12 dev=0,6,0 cdrom.iso

The first step creates an ISO image of the directory tree beginning at the directory <srcdir>. The second steps mounts the ISO image so you can check that you have everything you want on the CD. The final step copies the ISO image to the CD-R/RW drive. (You'll need to adjust the `speed=' switch according to your drive's abilities and the `dev=' switch to use the SCSI device string returned by the command `cdrecord -scanbus'.

If you're interested in music CDs, xcdroast works pretty well for a GUI-based means of creating (ahem) backup copies of your valuable CDs. You can use cdrecord directly for this as well (if memory serves, it's what xcdroast is running behind the scenes any way). It's a little more complex but it has its pluses in that you have a lot more control over the burn process.

Hope this gets you started in the right direction...

Rick

When you plug in the 80Gig, its almost definately recognized by usb mass storage and will get assigned a scsi device address (yeah.... its emulated to scsi, go figure.)

dmesg | grep sd

and you should see a scan for /dev/sda1 Depending on what filesystem is on it, you can probably mount it with:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/wherever

Of course that example is for good old windows fat32 and assuming you created a directory called /mnt/wherever. When you're done make certain to unmount the partition before yanking the cable:

umount /mnt/wherever

Cheers,

Finegan