Dear ALUG, I am looking to buying a USB hard drive and wondering if anyone knows anything about using them with Linux. Presumably I would have to set up a new block device connected to one of the USB ports. I could then mount it at somewhere like /mnt/usbhd. The ones I've looked at say that you have to write your own partition table and format the partitions yourself; how would I do this? (The details of the one I'm thinking of are here: http://www.dabs.com/products/prod-info3-info.asp?&m=y&quicklinx=2BDV.) Cheers in advance. Richard
Hi, On Fri, 19 Sep 2003, Richard Lewis (MUS) wrote:
Presumably I would have to set up a new block device connected to one of the USB ports. I could then mount it at somewhere like /mnt/usbhd.
Just add them to your /etc/fstab eg: /dev/sda1 /mnt/wd auto defaults,noauto 0 0
The ones I've looked at say that you have to write your own partition table and format the partitions yourself; how would I do this?
mke2fs /dev/sda1 See man mke2fs for appropriate options.
(The details of the one I'm thinking of are here: http://www.dabs.com/products/prod-info3-info.asp?&m=y&quicklinx=2BDV.)
I've got two Western Digital external USB drives, and they work fine. Dabs don't appear to stock them any more, though. Make sure that the drive is USB 2 (I think "High Speed" is 2), and that your computer supports USB 2 - data transfer will be very slow otherwise. HTH, Andrew.
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Andrew Savory -
Richard Lewis (MUS)