I just installed a Maxtor 500 GB external USB drive onto my Linux machine. Linux sees the drive but will not let me transfer files over to it. Do I need to format it? Thanks for any help.

Well, the external case/hdd combo I got had both USB and ethernet - there should (theoretically) be instructions on how to access it in the book that probably came with the case.

Something like a user interface that needs (maybe) a user name and password, then maybe theres some tools that allow you to format the drive. It depends on the case/chipset on what formats you can actually format the hard drive as. My one only allows me to format as FAT32 or the Mac format - which is why I don't use it (actually I installed the hard drive into my system because my old one died) as FAT32 only allows files of 4gb and my music file is about 38 gigs!

So if it shows up on your desktop, click it and see what happens.

Hopefully that will point you in the right direction?

regards

John

p.s. Oh and if may also be the case that you have to have your user in a certain group to make use of the drive - something like backup??? You could try to see if your user a/c is in the right group by doing "groups" in a console (well I think thats how it's done - though there should be a way of checking that in your graphical desktop/control centre/whatever it is that you're using calls it.

If your system uses hal & udev, you may be able to right click on the icon for the device and choose mount.

If not, you can mount it manually and use either "umask" or "fmask" and "dmask" to give others permissions to access the drive. You can instead use "uid" and "gid" options in the mount command to make you the owner of the filesystem.

See "man mount" for info on the mount command. There is also a "man 5 fstab" man page.

Thanks, John for your help!

By "sees the drive" do you mean that an icon pops up on your desktop or what? Generally, when you add a new drive to linux, you must partition it, create a filesystem(s) on your partition(s), create mountpoint(s) for the partition(s), and update /etc/fstab. You can probably do all that under the "Disks Managter" GUI, but I have no experience with it, as I've always done it all by hand in a terminal.

Thanks for your help!

mpdickson, not to "insult your intelligence" or jschiwal's suggestion of referring to man pages, but IMO that they (the man pages that is) are produced in a "bloody awful" format - not designed for "light reading" hence I'd direct you toward the "how to read MAN pages" link in my sig (I often refer to it - because they confuse the hell out of me)!

regards

John