Hi, I recently purchased a sitecom usb hard drive case to reutilize an old laptop hard drive. The disk is formatted as a fat32 file system. I have had sucess mounting this drive in mac OS X, windows XP and with a knoppix cd running a 2.4 kernel. My problem arises when I try to mount the disk on my fedora core 3 installation. I plug the drive in and I can hear it spinning up, but after about a second there is a click, at which point the process repeats.... This is a strange problem for me, especially when I have no problems mounting a USB pen, or my iPod mini. I think that the usb_storage module should be able to handle my sitecom drive, especially since other external usb drives DO work, AND this particular drive works with knoppix, on the same hardware. I am running fedora core 3, with a custom 2.6.9 kernel (I recompiled, disabling CONFIG_EFI_PARTION so my iPod mini would mount), but I get the same problem when I use the stock kernel that came with the distro. This is not a problem of me not knowing how to mount a disk. Fedora auto mounts my USB pens and iPod mini, and if not, I know how to use mount -t vfat /dev/sdXX /mnt. It seems to me that there is some conflict with the drive and usb_storage for 2.6 kernels (no problems in 2.4 series kernels). Any help on this issue would be most appreciated

Thank you, Chris Chizk

what does dmesg say?

last few lines of dmesg say:
usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using address 4
SCSI subsystem initialized
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: Genesys Model: USB to IDE Disk Rev: 0033
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
USB Mass Storage device found at 4
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.


I Do not have the drive plugged in at boot, because it seems to do wierd things. So I boot up, and then plug the drive in.... It seems to detect the drive, and loads the propper modules: scsi_mod, sd_mod, usb_storage... As soon as I plug the drive in, I get this wierd spinning up then click behavior, and the disk does not mount. Isusb or fedora's hwbrowser work fine before plugging in the device, but seem to hang after the device is plugged and then unplugged.

Could it be that the drive is formatted in a strange way? What is a correct way of formatting the drive? I formatted it on my laptop with a dos boot disk. At this point mac OS X saw it fine, but not windows. I then booted into knoppix and ran fdisk. turned off the boot flag, and windows magically saw the drive. But nothing from FC 3. Could the disk be spinning up, trying to look for something and when not found re trying ad infinitum? Could it be trying to mount the boot sector? How can I format a disk so that it does not have a boot sector? Should I just fdisk and reformat in knoppix to see what happens?