I have no clue how to access my external hard drive, or if I can.

I am using SuSE 8.1 on an HP Pavilion N5290 that is set up "dual boot" with WinXP. My peripherals work in XP.

PCMCIA works, as I regularly use a wireless card in it.

I have a Buslink USB 2.0 PCMCIA card. I have no idea if it is working, but /sbin/lspci shows this:

USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB 2.0 (rev. 02)

My built-in USB works, as I have a printer connected to that port. I have two entries in the /sbin/lspci output referencing:

USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev. 41)

I assume this is my regular USB.

My external hard drive, connected to the USB 2.0 PCMCIA card, is formatted FAT32. No response, though.

What do I try next?

Thanks.

I use a usb 2.0 pcmcia card as well with a usb storage device. I have an OrangeMicro card.

It seems that you need scsi support w/ your kernel to get it to work. My harddrive shows up as /dev/sda1 and mounts and works perfectly with no special configuration.

Distros this works with (that i've tried):
SUSE 8.0,8.1;VectorLinux 4.0rc1;Slackware 9.0

You might have to, as root:

mkdir /mnt/usbhd
chmod 777 /mnt/usbhd
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbhd

Then you should be able to access it. To have it available after booting each time, add the following line to the end of /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbhd vfat user,noauto,umask=0,exec 0 0

You can use any name you like; you don't need to use 'usbhd' if you'd prefer something different.

This is somewhat unrelated but I have been reading this thread and others trying to get my external USB hard drive which has all my music on it working. I followed the directions that were posted by geoff_f exactly and now it is working great.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome - I'm glad that I've been able to help.

this thread was extremely helpful, i hadnt a clue that usb drives were rec'd as scsi dev's that made it so much easier! THANKS!