Folks, I've had to reinstall SuSE 10.0 on my Toshiba Satellite 1905-303S. Previously, the machine automatically picked up either the USB drive (Maxtor One Touch II 300 gb) or my iRiver mp3 player via usb without any prompting from me. Now, however, when I plug either in, SuSE doesn't see it. When I do an fdisk -l /de/sda, it returns: /dev/sda doesn't have a valid partition table. When I "hotplug" the drive and run dmesg, SuSE clearly registers the drive, but, again it shows an "unknown partition table," then some interesting entries: FAT: bogus logical sector size 48 VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sda. VFS: Can't find an ext2 filesystem on dev sda. VFS: Can't find a Minix or Minix V2 filesystem on device sda. HFS+-fs: unable to find HFS+ superblock subfs: unsuccessful attempt to mount media (256) usb 1-2: USB disconnect, address 7 usb 1-2.4: USB disconnect, address 8 usb 1-2.7: USB disconnect, address 9 drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: usblp0: removed hub 1-0:1.0: over-current change on port 2 usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 10 hub 1-2:1.0: USB hub found hub 1-2:1.0: 7 ports detected usb 1-2.4: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 11 scsi3 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices usb-storage: device found at 11 usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning usb 1-2.7: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 12 drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: usblp0: USB Bidirectional printer dev 12 if 0 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x03F0 pid 0x8204 Vendor: Maxtor Model: OneTouch II Rev: 023g Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 04 SCSI device sda: 586114704 512-byte hdwr sectors (300091 MB) sda: assuming drive cache: write through SCSI device sda: 586114704 512-byte hdwr sectors (300091 MB) sda: assuming drive cache: write through sda: unknown partition table Attached scsi disk sda at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 Attached scsi generic sg0 at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 0, type 0 usb-storage: device scan complete One final, gulp, observation. I used the Yast2 partitioner to see what it could tell me about what already may be existing on the two drives. When I aimed it at the Maxtor, the entire disk read, gulp, "free." The iRiver, by contrast, shows an existing FAT32. Why do I think I can guess the answer to this already? :-/ If I've inadvertantly trashed the Maxtor, any recommendations on the best file format to use to partition it? Sigh... With best regards, Pete