On September 15, 2004 @ 8:05 AM, James Knott wrote
Need help mounting a USB disk drive
Greg Wallace wrote:
I have a Maxtor USB external disk drive device which I am currently using on my Windows machine. I have it formatted into 2 separate partitions, each of which is currently formatted as NTFS. I would like
to
be able to move that device between my Windows machine and my Linux machine. The idea would be to convert one of those partitions into either an EXT2 partition or a FAT partition and use it on my Linux machine. I'd like to be able to read and write to it from both my Linux and my Windows machine, but I, of course, definitely want read-write on the Linux side. Between EXT2 and FAT, whichever would offer the most flexibility as far as moving back and forth between machines would be how I'd want to go.
Use FAT, so that you can use it in any computer. Linux handles FAT quite well, but NTFS writing is "experimental" i.e. flakey.
I have never used a USB device on my Linux machine. Would I just
need
to create a high-level directory entry for use as a mount point and issue some sort of "mount ." command? How do you address usb devices (I. e., how do you obtain the handle that you would use in the mount command)? All of this would be brand new to me. Since there are 2 partitions on the disk, I suppose the mount command would have to have something in it to tell Linux which of the two partitions to mount. Also, should I delete the NTFS partition I want to use on Linux from the Windows side before I try to mount it on the Linux side and then re-add the partition on the Linux side, or would it be better to go ahead and mount that NTFS partition on the Linux side and then simply re-format it as EXT2 or FAT? Lots of questions here, I know. All of this would be brand new to me. Any direction greatly appreciated.
I wouldn't bother with 2 partitions. Just make it FAT and let it go at that. SuSE 9.1 will automount the drive.
Thanks for the info. I'll go with FAT, as you suggest. However, I want to keep the 2 partitions if at all possible. The first one is really just for use on my Windows machine. I put some pretty large files on it and NTFS lets me use some very large block sizes, which I really like. I also like the fact that Linux will have it's own dedicated partition. I really don't even need to be able to access the Windows partition on the Linux machine, but being able to browse it would be sort of nice. By the way, I'm still at 8.1, so not sure if that adds any limitations. I'm trying to move to 9.0 right now, but for the time being I want to be able to get this working on 8.1. I tried simply plugging the device into my Linux machine and powering up. Sure enough, it did auto-mount one of the two partitions for me. There was hard disk icon on my desktop labeled /media/sda1. If I click on this, it opens up what turns out to be partition 1 on the disk drive (the Windows partition). How do I mount partition 2? Also, I unmounted partition 1 as an experiment and the icon itself ended up going away. I looked around in some of the menu options and didn't see the tool for doing a mount manually. I re-booted the machine and it automounted again for me, but I'd like to know how to do this manually. Thanks, Greg Wallace