On Thu, 2009-12-31 at 16:27 +0000, nev young wrote:
Jonathan McDowell wrote:
On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 11:35:26PM +0000, Ian Thompson-Bell wrote:
nev young wrote:
You're missing the point. Linux doesn't recognise it at all. I can't format a drive if the system can't see it.
It may simply be that your Linux distro does not have NTFS support installed. have you checked this?
Unlike my older USB external drive that creates a device /dev/sdd1 on the desktop which I can then mount.
Not surprising because that was probably FAT rather than NTFS.
No, really, you're missing nev's point. What filesystem is on the drive is irrelevant if the raw devices nodes aren't even created. Getting /dev/sdd and /dev/sdd1 created when the device is plugged in is purely about Linux recognising that there's a new block device present on the SCSI subsystem and then being able to read the partition table correctly. Filesystem doesn't come into it until you actually try to mount the device.
Right. Forget everything !!! My wife went and got me one as a late xmas pressie! :-)
I plugged it in and it just worked. OK it comes as FAT32 but happily re-formats to ext3
If the case for the one I bought last year ever gets used is no longer an issue. Thanks for those who have spent time thinking about it and replying.
That is what I would have expected was the most likely outcome. On the other hand I have had an experience with a temperamental USB disk which failed to work correctly not only on Linux but on my satellite STB which was what I bought it for in the first place.
Sometimes when plugging it into a Linux PC the disk light would show the disk busy for ages (several minutes) but at that point the filesystem was not mounted (though maybe a mount attempt was in progress) and this was way more activity than should have been required to do such things as reading the partition table and basic filesystem metadata.
With the STB the STB software would complain that the disk was not ready when it was powered and connected and nothing had been changed since it had last worked.
I returned it but when tested they said it worked fine on their PC and on another STB, though of course I don't know if it was the same STB as I had.
I did read about a "last sector bug" where some drives would report themselves one sector bigger than they actually were thus causing confusion when the OS tries to read the last sector and the drive returns the error code for "sector does not exist" when the drive had previously reported that as within the possible range of sectors and, from what I remember, the suggestion was that Linux was affected by this bug but windows was not though this was all some time ago and I still don't know if this was the problem or not.
If anyone is interested I could dig out the model numbers, though this was not a recent purchase and may well have been superceded.
However, I wish to learn !
As I see it when I connect the device: something detects the new hardware and creates the /dev/usb nodes something then assigns these as a device something assigns the device as a disk something mounts it. there has to be a device driver in there somewhere.
Can any one point me to a good reference so I can learn how it all hangs together?
I can't recommend anything at the moment though perhaps I should find out more and I am having some USB trouble at the moment. If I do I'll let you know.
Regards, Steve.