USB hard drive help

[Thierry de Coulon]

On Sunday 23 November 2003 15:02, Terry Houle wrote:
> I am new to this list and therefore apologize if this topic has
> recently been discussed.  I did search the recent archives and found a
> couple things relative to command line but they are not working
> properly for me.
> Anyway I have just put  YDL 3.0 on my i Book and desperately want to
> use the USB dongle.  Can anyone point me to a simple way to do it and
> preferably would be with a GUI?
> I spent hours going looking thru the system to find something and no
> luck. I am currently using the KED desktop.  In one spot I found my USB
> device listed  and I think it was under info but don’t recall the exact
> title.
> Utopia would be  to have it appear on the desktop like in OS X.

Automatic mounting on OS X depends on compatibility. I've got one of these 
thingies that works, another not (I have to mount it by hand on OS X).

>
> Have tried things like:
> [root]# mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/usb  and mount -t vfat /dev/sda1
> /mnt/flash/  but since I don’t know command line am not sure what I am
> doing.

First thing is to know how it is formated, or to format it as hfs on some Mac 
runing OS 9. Then under Linux you have to find what partition you use.

You probably have to load the usb-storage module: look where modprobe is 
(could be /sbin or /usr/sbin) and run as root: ./modprobe usb-storage

Now your usb drive should be mapped to /dev/sda, or /dev/sdb if you have some 
other usb storage thing such as a zip.

pdisk /dev/sda should return the partition table. If you formated as vfat it's 
probably /dev/sda1 but if hfs probably /dev/sda9 or sda10 or sda11.

Now you can mount it with mount -t <type> /dev/sdax /mnt/usb

If you'd like GUI you have to put it in /dev/fstab with the mount point and 
some kind of mounting (I prefer noauto but you may experiment various 
automounts) and you can put a drive object on the KDE desktop - or whatever 
equivalent Gnome uses.

> Any help or pointers in the right  direction would be greatly
> appreciated.

>
> Terry Houle

Hope this helps,

Thierry

-- 
Smile . . . tomorrow will be worse.