After a few lists indicated it might work I recently purchased the above external drive to use on my dual boot windows xp/mandrake 10.1 system. I don't want to boot from it. My internal hard drive has 80gb which I've split right down the middle for the two platforms to run from. I just want to use it for storage that can be shared by both. It installs well enough in xp, but when I booted into mandrake and plugged in the drive I encountered some problems. It reads it well enough to list it on the desktop, and when i click on properties the system identifies it correctly. But it won't open. The error message I get is: "mount: special device/dev/sdb1 does not exist. Please check that the disk is entered correctly." The device shows up in harddrake as "other/unknown" at the very bottom of the list, again correctly identified. But when I click to configure, it lists no parameters. I'm still very new to liinux, and especially to Mandrake, and if there's anyone who can walk me through installing this thing I'd be most appreciative.

Hello,
Always when something doesn't work; check the "syslog", it is the file "/var/log/messages".
Check the end of this file for related error printouts. This is almost always the number 1 thing
to do.

Since the HW seems to be indentified correctly it could be an unsupported file system. I run from
a Maxtor Onetouch without problems, but re-partitioned and re-formatted. Check in Windows what
file system it is on the HD. If it is "NTFS" you should reformat the disk since Linux is not good at
handling that fs. If you want the disk to be accessed from both Linux and Windows it should have
a FAT32 file system.

If it has a FAT32 file system or if you reformat the disk the corresponding name on Linux is "vfat".
To manually mount the disk do something like (as "root");

mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /your/mount/point

Best Regards,
L Ekman

i have gotten that harddrive to work under slackware, fedora core 1,2 and 3 without any problems. as far as i can remeber it came formatted as fat32. sdb is the designation linux would give it if it was your second externel drive. are you sure it should be sdb and not sda?

Hi, i'm going to buy an external Hardisk. I'm looking the next one:

Maxtor OneTouch FireWire and USB - Disco duro - 200 GB - externo - FireWire / Hi-Speed USB - USB de 4 espigas, 6 PIN FireWire - 7200 rpm - búfer: 8 MB

There are somebody who has tested if it works fine with linux... ?
It this case, i have never installed an external HD. How are the steps to follow?
Maybe they are:
- usb modules
- usb 2 modules
- usb-storage
any more ?

And then... where it will be mounted ?
/dev/hdXy are for IDEs, aren't they?
on /dev/usbX ???

Any guide or references will be really appreciate.

Thanks and nice weekend