USB external Disk reports wrong size
 

I have Mandrake 10.1 with hotplug service enabled and Amacom 10GB usb disk. I want to use it to backup documents stored in home directories.

Fine - its mounted. It appears on Desktop at login. KDE3.2. The device is /dev/sda1 and mounted at /mnt/removable. Cool

Using Mandrakes Control panel as su root, I have configured a backup of the documents. However the Amacom disk size is reported through the backup interface as only having 500MB space and can only be reduced not enlarged to its true capacity. I have reformated it, re partioned it and set it to file system ext3. It is reported by harddrake as 9.3GB free

Today I manually tried to tar a backup to it but this failed as the disk size was reported as insufficient. I am a real newbie with linux and hoped that Mandrake would make it all painless. I have set this up as Samba server for a peer2peer network OK but I am stuck with what to investigate next regarding this disk problem

Is it just incompatible hardware? Fine I'll go get a compatible external disk. BUt before that I have to rule out my newbieness.

Any suggestions on what to check would be great.

alans

Hello alans,

I certainly dont think its incompatible hardware. I have a similar device (an old laptop hard drive in a caddy connected via USB) and it mounts fine. I have formatted it to FAT32 however so it can be read by the windows machines that I still have to use from time to time. I'm not sure if this is a solution however I certainly dont think its incompatible.

Regards
Chris