liquidzoo Posted August 4, 2004 Report Share Posted August 4, 2004 I have a 40GB usb (2.0, but that's not the issue) hard drive that I can't get working at all. Harddrake recognizes it properly (sda1) and correctly identifies the usb-storage module for it to use, but diskdrake won't let me partition it at all. I know it has been partitioned, but I'm not sure what fs I used. This drive worked with 9.2. There's no data on it (yet) so I'm not concerned about data loss. Anyone have any ideas on what I can try to get it recognized, partitioned, and mounted? Right now, it's just not working. There is no fstab entry for it (yet) and I want it mountable/writable by my user. Not the biggest issue, though. I can set the permissions on the drive after it's been mounted. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
papaschtroumpf Posted August 4, 2004 Report Share Posted August 4, 2004 doesn't the disk need to be unmounted in order to be partionned? I assume when you plug it in it gets automounted. Something to try. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted August 4, 2004 Report Share Posted August 4, 2004 Open a console, su to root and run: # fdisk -l that should list all partitions whether mounted or not and tell you what filesystem is on the usb hard drive partition. Post the output of the above and we can take a crack at creating a fstab entry for it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
liquidzoo Posted August 4, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 4, 2004 fdisk -l doesn't report it at all. Windows doesn't recognize it, so I think it's formatted ext2 or ext3. My Partition Magic won't start on my laptop. It says my partition table is bad (bs, but whatever). I have not tried mounting it on my laptop, but I need it mounted on my desktop. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest MugenAcc99 Posted August 4, 2004 Report Share Posted August 4, 2004 Liquid - I have a 200gb external HD and setting it up was a pain. Heres what I would do: 1. Find any type of tool you can to delete the partitions you have now. Easiest way, (though it kinda sucks you have to use it) is to boot up windows xp pro or 2000 and go to Start->Settings->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management. From there go to Storage->Disk Management. Although Windows will not recgonize and assign a drive letter to a partition with an ext2 or ext3 file system, it will show up in the disk manager (if the hardware is working right). From there you can right click the external HD partition and delete it. Now you have an unpartitioned HD and this, I found, is the easiest to work with in diskdrake. 2. Boot into Linux. Let harddrake autodetect the drive and reassign it as sda1. Then it should bring you to diskdrake where you can format the drive. If diskdrake doesnt work at the begninning when linux is still in text mode, just wait till the system is fully booted and try running diskdrake again. From what I can remember, I ran diskdrake in X11, but if you can do it before then it will be just as easy. I formatted mine as etx3. Because of one of the options in the fstab entry you will have to make for the drive, I would definately go with ext3. After that is all formatted, we have one more thing to do. 3. Now go into your /mnt directory and add a folder named ExternalHD. After this is done, open up your fstab file. Find any entry harddrake put in for sda1 and delete it. Now add: /dev/sda1 /mnt/ExternalHD ext3 noauto,user,rw 0 0 I had a wierd error when I booted letting the HD automount, so I used the noauto option. User lets users access the drive and I used rw just to make sure the drive is read write. The two 0's at the end of the entry stop dump and fsck from messing with the drive on boot. I think the wierd error I had was becase of fsck and if you have an ext3 fs, fsck doesnt really matter much. I have had no problems from dump or fsck. Well, good luck with your HD man. I am going to get back to crawling out of dependency hell trying to install Fluxbox. Hopefully what I did with my HD will work for you, but if not, tell me how it went and we can look at it again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
liquidzoo Posted August 5, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 5, 2004 Ok, here's an update: MugenAcc99: No dice, as we talked about in #musb. The XP disk manager doesn't even detect it. I downloaded some demo partition managers to try them out. I couldn't get them to actually do anything, but Arconis (spelling might be off) did actually detect that the drive was there, but said there was a problem with sector 0. fdisk and cfdisk on /dev/sda came back with errors that it wasn't able to access the disk. So that's where I'm at. I really want access to this drive. I want to format it (vfat) so I can back up my music, but if there's a problem on the disk, I'm not sure that's such a good idea. I may end up backing it all up on to cd's (like 40 of them, seriously) but I really don't want to do that. Let me explain what I want to do and maybe there will be an easier way: I have 19 gigs of unpartitioned space on my main hard drive. This space is right after my music (/mnt/music, vfat) partition. I want to expand that partition using diskdrake to fill the rest of the unpartitioned space. I also don't want to lose any of the data that's currently on the partition, hence the desire to back everything up to my usb hd. Anyone have a clue here? Can I safely do this without losing any of the data if I unmount the partition and resize it? Any ideas would be helpful. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted August 6, 2004 Report Share Posted August 6, 2004 What is the make and model of the drive? Is it a regular hard drive that was put in one of those ide to usb enclosures? In my experience, fdisk -l will list all partitions on any device that the system recognizes whether mounted or not. Even if the partitions are messed up , fdisk -l will tell you how they are messed up. If you get nothing on fdisk -l, the system isn't recognizing the thing in any meaningful way. Are you sure you have the proper modules loaded? Post the printout of: # lsmod Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
liquidzoo Posted August 6, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 6, 2004 [ liquidzoo ]# lsmod Module Size Used by isofs 34360 1 zlib_inflate 22400 1 isofs sg 38460 0 st 39932 0 sr_mod 18756 0 sd_mod 21952 0 scsi_mod 117388 4 sg,st,sr_mod,sd_mod nfsd 196896 8 exportfs 6176 1 nfsd parport_pc 34368 1 lp 12108 0 parport 40328 2 parport_pc,lp ipv6 244544 26 snd-seq-midi 8640 0 snd-emu10k1-synth 7808 0 snd-emux-synth 37920 1 snd-emu10k1-synth snd-seq-virmidi 7392 1 snd-emux-synth snd-seq-midi-emul 8512 1 snd-emux-synth snd-seq-oss 33600 0 snd-seq-midi-event 7584 3 snd-seq-midi,snd-seq-virmidi,snd-seq-oss snd-seq 51888 8 snd-seq-midi,snd-emux-synth,snd-seq-virmidi,snd-seq-midi-emul,snd-seq-oss,snd-seq-midi-event snd-pcm-oss 54984 0 snd-mixer-oss 19616 2 snd-pcm-oss snd-emu10k1 97032 4 snd-emu10k1-synth snd-rawmidi 24484 3 snd-seq-midi,snd-seq-virmidi,snd-emu10k1 snd-pcm 95720 2 snd-pcm-oss,snd-emu10k1 snd-timer 25028 2 snd-seq,snd-pcm snd-seq-device 8200 7 snd-seq-midi,snd-emu10k1-synth,snd-emux-synth,snd-seq-oss,snd-seq,snd-emu10k1,snd-rawmidi snd-ac97-codec 69412 1 snd-emu10k1 snd-page-alloc 11720 2 snd-emu10k1,snd-pcm snd-util-mem 4640 2 snd-emux-synth,snd-emu10k1 snd-hwdep 9156 2 snd-emux-synth,snd-emu10k1 snd 55620 20 snd-seq-midi,snd-emux-synth,snd-seq-virmidi,snd-seq-oss,snd-seq-midi-event,snd-seq,snd-pcm-oss,snd-mixer-oss,snd-emu10k1,snd-rawmidi,snd-pcm,snd-timer,snd-seq-device,snd-ac97-codec,snd-util-mem,snd-hwdep soundcore 9728 2 snd af_packet 21224 0 w83627hf 28836 0 eeprom 7752 0 i2c-sensor 2848 2 w83627hf,eeprom i2c-isa 1984 0 i2c-viapro 7052 0 i2c-core 23700 5 w83627hf,eeprom,i2c-sensor,i2c-isa,i2c-viapro raw 8384 1 ide-floppy 19520 0 ide-tape 36208 0 ide-cd 41728 1 cdrom 39452 2 sr_mod,ide-cd floppy 59792 0 thermal 12392 0 processor 17192 1 thermal fan 3972 0 button 6288 0 battery 8836 0 ac 4772 0 tulip 46048 0 supermount 39220 2 nls_iso8859-1 4032 2 nls_cp850 4864 1 vfat 13696 1 fat 46112 1 vfat nvidia 4809812 14 via-agp 8704 1 agpgart 33576 2 via-agp pcspkr 3432 0 tsdev 7776 0 usbmouse 5632 0 evdev 9664 0 joydev 9984 0 usbkbd 7264 0 usbhid 44416 0 usblp 12448 1 quickcam 123296 0 videodev 9696 1 quickcam uhci-hcd 31760 0 ehci-hcd 29604 0 ohci-hcd 21380 0 usbcore 110848 11 usbmouse,usbkbd,usbhid,usblp,quickcam,uhci-hcd,ehci-hcd,ohci-hcd rtc 11800 0 reiserfs 266996 5 As a note, the drive is not plugged in at the moment. The drive is a Maxtor 40GB usb2.0 drive. Bought it from Staples about a year (maybe more) ago. It is correctly identified by harddrake and the usb-storage module is the correct module for a drive like this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted August 6, 2004 Report Share Posted August 6, 2004 Maybe it's late and I'm a little tired but I don't see the usb storage module loaded there. Try running: # modprobe usb-storage # fdisk -l with the drive connected. To show you what I'm getting at, here's the relevant printout of my lsmod: # lsmod | grep usb usb-storage 72932 0 scsi_mod 114648 5 sg,sd_mod,sr_mod,ide-scsi,usb-storage usbcore 99132 5 usb-storage,ehci-hcd,uhci-hcd I don't think you have the module loaded and you also seem to have a lot on that usb bus(both uhci and ohci modules). I take it you have a usb expansion card which typically uses the ohci module if it's not intel based. See what results you get with the above. You may have to move that drive to a different usb port to get it to work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
liquidzoo Posted August 6, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 6, 2004 The expansion card is a usb2 card. It worked here before. As I said earlier, though; the drive is not plugged in now. When it is plugged in, the usb-storage module is loaded correctly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted August 6, 2004 Report Share Posted August 6, 2004 My lsmod output was with my external hard drive disconnected as well. I notice your running 10.1 beta which might explain the problem right there. I was going to download 10.1 and give it a try. I let you know if I have problems with my usb drive; it might be a hotplugging bug. Other than beta weirdness, I'd check my cabling and try different usb ports. I assume you've verified that the drive is working properly on another box. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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