Folks, I've got a Maxtor 300 GB outboard usb drive that I've been using with SuSE 10.0 on my Toshiba laptop Satellite-1905-303s) with no problems...until..sigh...I wanted to see what all the hoopla was about with Ubuntu (now donning flame-retardant clothes). I suspect I screwed something up because after returning to SuSE. The drive returned bad partition-table errors when I tried to mount it (although dmesg shows that the system was seeing it -- previous posts). Using the partitioner in Yast, I finally got it formatted as reisferFS and as a single partition, but access has been achingly slow compared with my pre Ubuntu testing period. And now, root is the only possible user. I try to chown as root and get a file/directory not found -- even though it's there. So I figured I'd try to reformat again and start from scratch. But SuSE's partitioner returns a -3002 error when I try to make a change. I can copy files and make directories, but only as root (which may not be a bad thing). Ultimately, I'd like to have the drive accessible as user and try to return it to some semblance of its former speed. (Interestingly, when I reboot, the drive doesn't activate until once the machine is running and I pull out the usb plug and put it back -- shouldn't it get recognized during boot-up?) I suspect I've gotten myself in a bit over my head on this one... With best regards, Pete -- Peter N. Spotts | Science Correspondent The Christian Science Monitor One Norway Street, Boston, MA 02038 USA Office: 1-671-450-2449 | Office in home: 1-508-520-3139 www.csmonitor.com | www.peterspotts.net pspotts@alum.mit.edu