Okay here it goes.

I've used Linux a bit at work and love and have set up my home machine to use Linux and have been loving it, though I've got a ways to go before I can do all the things I normally did in Windows. Right now, I've got a computer at work and at home, both with Maxtor external drives attached via USB.

Home machine problem:

This drive mounts and reads fine, but when I go into Mandrake Control's (using 9.1) mount point listings, it tells me that my partition for the external drive overlaps with another partition. When I look at the drive I see one red partition and one blue. The blue is fat32 and is mounted where I told it to mount in my fstab. It's using dev/sda5. The red entry is ext3 and isn't mounted anywhere and uses sda1. They both claim to occupy the full volume of the drive. I'm tempted to just delete the ext3 partition as the fat32 has all my MP3s, movies, and misc storage stuff on it. However, I'm hesitant to do so as the drive contains all my MP3s, movies, and misc storage stuff on it.

My fstab looks like this:

/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda8 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sda5 /mnt/MaxtorExt vfat users,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,umask=0,kudzu 0 0,exec
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/cdrom2 supermount dev=/dev/hdd,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 /usr ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda7 /var ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc1 /STORAGE auto users,iocharset=iso8859-1,kudzu,codepage=850,noauto,umask=0,exec 0 0

...and I can't seem to see why it would try and fook up my mount point listing like that but I want a more seasoned set of opinions before I potentially hash all my storage into useless bits. Also, if I do screw it up, it's vfat and not ext3; is there a good way to restore little boo boos like that? I know ext3 is fairly unforgiving, but that other fs's are more flexible.

And now for the office machine:

It no longer sees the usb drive at all! regardless of my fstab settings, no matter which plug I plug it in to, it won't see the Maxtor drive. It will, however, see my Peerless drive and Zip. And the Maxtor works fine on other machines. Any ideas how I can get it back and get it assigned to a dev/xxx listing??

Thanks in advance,
Sam

Does your Maxtor drive have more then one partition? If so how is it partitioned? I ask since you are using /dev/sda5.

I assume that the Peerless drive and Zip drive would also use SCSI emulation so when they are all hooked up you would have SCSI drives sda, sdb and sdc. If so then the Maxtor might not be sda anymore.

Also in the fstab listing for /dev/sda5 the exec needs to be in the options section there shouldn't be anything after the 0 0. And drop the kudzu from the options too.

It's just one big 80GB chunk of data. It used to be sda1, but some freakout changed all that. I've been fiddling with permissions so I can copy my MP3's and such to my HD as the Maxtor was being used as backup. After attempting to user,users and umask 000 0 0 to aid in permissionland it freaked and reassigned the device listing hence the overlap. Dunno how to undo it though.

And while we're on the topic, what the hell is kudzu anyway? I didn't see any listing for it in the 'man fstab'.

Thanks for your help.

kudzu is the same as found new hardware tool in wiindows.

I am unsure how to undo also.

Okay, the plot thickens...

I took the drive over to a Windows machine to make sure it was working. Blue screen.

I then took it back to the Linux Box to see what was happening. Now the drive shows up as two overlapping 80GB ext3 partitions. No vFat to be found!!!

My questions are these:

Is there some thing I have to do before removing a USB drive, aside from unmounting it, where the results of not doing it might be the above problems?

My fstab seems to be pretty kosher, so I don't think it's screwing things up, so what could cause the OS to believe that there's (out of the blue) an overlapping partition? I think this is the key here as it seems to happen every time I dis- and reconnect the drive. Perhaps next time it will find 3 partitions. And for the record, I shut down each time before unplugging the device.

Perhaps a study of hotplug setups? Perhaps a study of configuring modules?

I'm more than happy to do the research, but I'm still fairly novice and don't really know what's going on architecturally and therefore don't know where to start looking. Any resources, books, etc. that you guys think might help me in my quest would be most appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Sam