Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1438 mails)

[Lew Wolfgang <wolfgang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Randall R Schulz wrote:
> On Wednesday May 6 2009, Felix Miata wrote:
> > ...
> >
> > Have you tried accessing it with a partitioning program yet? Until
> > there are partitions, there is nothing for any user activity except a
> > partitioning program to access.
>
> Good point. And if there are partitions but they're unformatted or 
> formatted with a file system type not supported by installed drivers, 
> the net effect would be similar (nothing seems to happen when the drive 
> is attached).

Indeed, if it works with Windows than maybe it has some foul
NTFS filesystem installed.

I usually assume that any off-the-shelf external disk is unusable
until I put my own filesystem on it.  If this disk was on my
system I'd do the following from the command line as root.
(WARNING!  You can trash your system if you mess up here!!!
If you don't understand commands like fdisk and mkfs be sure
to read and understand the man pages.  Man is your friend.)

1.  Check /var/log/messages to see what /dev/sdX device it was
mounted on.  In this case it looks like /dev/sdc.

2.  Run fdisk /dev/sdc to check the disk labeling and find what
partitions are defined.  If necessary I'll create a new label
and partition table.  See "man fdisk".

3.  Create my own filesystem.  If the disk will be used only on
Linux boxes I'll use reiserfs.  If I want both Linux and Windows
to be able to use it I'll format with fat-32.  Assuming that
partition 1 is the one you want:

   For Linux only:  mkreiserfs /dev/sdc1

   For Linux/Windows:  mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdc1

The disk should now automount when hot-plugged.  If it doesn't
you might try mounting it manually, as in "mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt".

Once again, be careful.  The command-line can byte if you're root
and you mess up.

Regards,
Lew
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