install maxtor USB external hard drive

Electro · 04-07-2004, 04:14 AM

You have to use sync in the mounting options or get into a habit of running sync before you unmount and disconnect the drive. Putting USB storage devices in the fstab file is not smart. Use hotplug to handle the mounting.

Also when I was copying 80+ GB files, both the source and the destination did freeze for a few seconds. I had to make a script to copy each file individually because if I did a recursive copy it will missed some files. I think there is a bug in the usb-storage, sd_mod and maybe the scsi module when working with large files and a few days of copying 50000+ files. Using dd and using its sync option to get a perfect copy of the file will might work better. Probably kernel 2.6.x version might fix the problems with USB.

I formatted my 120 GB hard drive as FAT32 under LINUX but it was through diskdruid. I did not get to the console in time and type ps ax to find out the command that it used. You can use Win98 format utility. It formats 120 GB hard drives just fine. I have not try running Wiin98 format utility in WINE.

I was not using an external usb brand. I was using a regular IDE hard drive and a USB to IDE board.

nix21 · 04-11-2004, 03:53 PM

Will it make a difference if the partition is logical or primary? I have a external 160gb maxtor with a 100gb NTFS primary and a 60gb FAT32 logical, that doesn't want to mount.

Electro · 04-11-2004, 05:44 PM

Its easier to get your files back when they are on the primary partition if the partition table got corrupted. It does not matter if you made one big logical partition or one big primary.

nix21, when you type fdisk -l for the USB drive. What does it list. I think you are trying to mount the extended partition. The extended partition is a container for logical partitions. The partition after the extended partition is the one you want to mount.

nix21 · 04-12-2004, 08:37 AM

Electro - I actually tried mounting all three.

sda1 was the container for sda2 - NTFS and sda5 - FAT32. So there seemed to be no reason why the normal

mount -t vfat /dev/sda5 /mnt

shouldn't have worked. Basically I decided that somehow the FAT partition may not have been formated correctly. So last night decided to re-format the FAT32 partition, luckily had only a few files on there that I could restore later. After the format I tried the mount command again and this time it worked!

So who knows what was wrong with it because I formated exaclty the same as I did the first time with Partition Magic in Windows. With the addition of a fstab entry the drive is now automounting correctly.

crm · 05-09-2004, 07:00 PM

what filesystem is mac osx?
i have a 160gb Lacie hdd (with bungs of mac osx stuff including all my mp3's) which im trying to mount using fedora, mount -l /dev/sda /mnt/lacie

Code:

invalid argument
bogus cluster size 0
VFS: cant find a valid FAT filesystem on dev 08:01
mount: you must specify a file system type

one small problem... my system aslo has a scsi card, with a hard drive and a cd writer attached to it, neather of which are working in fedora at all at the moemnt... are theese problems related? how do i get everything working? can i have some food? chicken?

perry · 05-31-2004, 10:23 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by BeckerB
Thanks for your help. Hope you don't mind a few more questions. Currently, my maxtor external drive seems to be somewhat detected; when I do a "mount", one of the returned lines is "usbdevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)". I seem to be stuck trying to determine which /dev/file is associated with the usb device; if I could determine that, then I could put a record in /etc/fstab, unplug and replug the device, and see what happens. Any idea how to determine which /dev/file is associated with the usb device? The other line of thought is that there must be .conf file somewhere that determines the default mount parameters; if I could locate that and edit it, perhaps that would mount it correctly. Any suggestions? One last question: when I unplug the drive, are there any other steps I need to take, like unmounting the device first?

during installation of mandrake 9.1, if you specify "Standard" security, mandrake will automatically detect the attached maxtor drive and make it available automatically whenever you sign in. if you have a higher security level, you end up with read-only access.

initially i think i had to fiddle with hotplug in order to get it to detect and use the drive. other than that i don't know what to tell you concerning redhat other than make sure your usb support is uptodate and ofcourse pay special attention to your hotpug version. incidentally, most of the devices listed below are attached by way of external linksys usb hub and work great (except for the backpack now giving it needs a backpack rpm, a newer hotplug, but it's starting to wear out so i'm leaving it out for now)

hope this helps

- perry

perry · 06-06-2004, 08:28 AM

this is what i got for an external 40 gig maxtor:

Code:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/maxtor vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

works pretty good

- perry

rhettd · 06-22-2004, 08:56 PM

Just wanted to add to this, I'm using mandrake 10.0 and have a 120GB maxtor one touch usb harddrive (NTFS) and was having some problems due to mandrake automatically mounting the drive incorrectly, but after deleting the entry for /mnt/removable in my fstab file, and putting in:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/removable ntfs user,umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0
users can mount (mount /dev/sda1) and access files on the drive fine! For some reason mandrake kept mounting it thinking it was fat32.