Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3225 mails)

[Fergus Wilde <fwilde@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

I dropped a line to the list recently to ask for firewire external hard drive 
recommendations - from the deafening silence I gather few are doing this.

For the record, though, and for other non-professional tinkerers who'd like a 
lot of portable-ish disk space added cheapishly:

Having read Babu Walad's and Art Fore's correspondence, though I went ahead 
and bought a LaCie external drive.  

While I could load the module ieee1394 using modprobe, I hit a problem 
loading the module ohci1394, and after some messing about worked out the the 
chipset of my existing IEEE1394 PCI card was not ohci compliant.  There *is* 
a module for the chipset of that card, pcilynx, but although I was able to 
load that module switching on the drive completely locked up kde, mouse and 
keyboard and I had to do a hard reset.  I'd be interested to hear from anyone 
who has got a drive running from a pcilynx 1394 card, or from anyone who 
knows why you can't.

I had another firewire card available, known ohci compliant, and installed 
that.  This time modules ieee1394, raw1394 and ohci1394 all loaded without 
complaint, and as soon as I switched on the drive it appeared in the list 
generated by fdisk -l .  I didn't seem to need module sbp2, which was 
mentioned in Art and Babu's correspondence, but I've no idea if others would 
need it.  I then added the following to the end of /etc/boot.local:

modprobe ieee1394
modprobe ohci1394
modprobe raw1394

I didn't do Art or Babu's lines in /etc/modules.conf either (for the record 
they were:

pre-install ohci1394 modprobe ieee1394
pre-install sbp2 modprobe ohci1394

And maybe I would have got a more elegant result if I had.  But early hairy 
experiences editing said file put me off, and I've tended to stay away from 
it since.  Doubtless I should return to it and learn how it works.  The setup 
I have does appear to work, though.

I then used Yast2 to partition and format the new drive as sdb1 (I already 
have a zip drive that calls itself sda), though command line tools would have 
done just as well no doubt.  Yast added a line to /etc/fstab for the new 
drive, which needed to be edited by hand because it chose 'defaults' :

/dev/sdb1       /backup   reiserfs        defaults 1 4

whereas I needed something more like this:

/dev/sdb1       /backup    reiserfs    noauto,user 0 0

Otherwise the drive is included in the fsck list, and as I'd put the module 
modprobe lines in /etc/boot.local fsck became upset when it couldn't find the 
drive.  As the drive will sometimes be there, sometimes not, you want it 
mounted noauto anyway and excluded from fsck.

That was it, the drive can now be mounted with 'mount /backup' issued as a 
user, and then reads and writes with creditable speed, noticeably slower than 
an ATA100, but not much slower than an ATA33 drive on the same machine.  
Things work nicest if the drive is switched on once the machine is booted.

The LaCie product works fine, it was cheaper than Amacom or Iomega offerings 
from my source of purchase, but that could be because it's a bit big to heft 
around. I was only working from catalogue pictures anyway, but maybe the more 
expensive products are smaller and lighter.  I guess LaCie probably didn't 
intend this particular external drive to be regularly carried around.

Best to all
Fergus