Hello,

I've just connected a USB external hard drive to CentOS 5.
I then formatted to ext3 and mounted it and added to the fstab to automount.
How do you find in Linux whether it's using USB 2.0 or USB 1.0?

And when I do fdisk -l, it shows up as NTFS even though I've formatted it (sda2) to ext3 and it's writable by Linux.
#fdisk -l

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 6 48163+ de Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 7 19452 156199995 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19452 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

If what I am suspecting is correct then you may have formatted the wrong hard disk because there is no Linux partition shown there.

If you want error free hard disk operation then reboot after you change the partitions, then mount the new partition before formatting it.

You can format a partition independent of its ID so difficult to say what you actually did to expand on saikee's post. Since sda1 is a dell utility parititon I would guess this to be your internal hard drive. You did not include any partition information for sdb which could be your USB drive.

The command lspci should show what type of USB controllers are in this computer.

sda is the external USB hard drive which I mounted to /home/external. The internal hard drive is hda.
I can write to the external USB hard drive sda2 in Linux although slow in speed.
I didn't format sda1, the one that shows up as Dell Utility and did format sda2 but I'm not sure why it shows up as NTFS when I do fdisk -l.
Did I format it wrong?

By using lspci:
00:1f.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801BA/BAM USB (Hub #1) (rev 02)
00:1f.4 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801BA/BAM USB (Hub #2) (rev 02)

Is (rev 02) = USB 2.0?
I think it's USB 1.0 since if it's USB 2.0 it would say USB 2.0 (rev 02) right?

Thanks.


# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
37G 3.1G 32G 9% /
/dev/hda1 99M 16M 79M 17% /boot
tmpfs 125M 0 125M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2 147G 4.8G 135G 4% /home/external

# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/hda: 40.9 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 4982 39913492+ 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19452 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 6 48163+ de Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 7 19452 156199995 7 HPFS/NTFS

I believe you have a USB 1.1 controller which has a max speed of 12.5 Mbps.

You did not format it wrong. As stated the partition ID has no bearing on the filesystem, i.e. A linux native filesystem partition ID is 83 but you can format it with ext2/3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, etc and it will still be 83. linux does not care but if using windows you could have problems. Use you can cfdisk or fdisk to change the partition ID type.

Thanks, I appreciate it.