2009/12/30 nev young nev@nevilley.demon.co.uk:
Hi all,
Hope every one has had a merry xmas.
Yes very good thanks!
Does any one know if this[1] 1.5Tb USB disk from Maplins will work on an ubuntu 9.10 machine? If not how could I make it work?
I bought a similar one last year and it was not recognised by the PC so I ended up removing the HDD and installing it as an internal drive.
I have never heard of a drive not working in Linux but working in Windows or Mac, that sounds crazy to me? This drive should work just fine. If it doesn't work straight out of the box just format the volume and start over.
It says on the bottom of that page this drive is useable buy Windows so it may come pre-formatted as an NTFS or FAT32 volume which is fully supported in Ubuntu. Also it said it can be used by Mac OS X so that means it could be used for HFS/+ or ext3 which again are both fully supported buy Linux (Well HFS/+ not so stable but obviously ext3 is).
Ultimately you can bet your bottom dollar it will come pre-formatted as either an NTFS or FAT32 volume as thats the only file system type supported on all the versions of Mac and Windows listed on the Maplins page so it should work fine with Ubuntu.
As I said I have never heard of a drive not being compatible from a virtual point of view only a physical point of view i.e. wrong connect type for a motherboard? (Although in this case its an external USB drive so all you need is a single USB socket?). Irrelevant of how the hard drive comes pre-formatted you can reformat it to what ever you want!