[ydl-gen] usb drives

[Robert Spykerman]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Robert Black <Robert.A.Black at noaa.gov> wrote:

> Anybody know how to format a usb drive for use by YDL 6.2? Also, can this
> formatting be done on a Mac or a PC?

As far as I know, your average usb key/stick is readable by YDL out of
the box. Most of them, as far as I know, use the FAT32 file system. As
a removable drive, there are advantages, I guess, to sticking with
this, ie most other machines will read FAT32, mac included. The only
demand I have that is not met by FAT32 is the file size limit (ie
approx 4Gb)  - I use usb devices to back up my entire PS3 (linux) HD.
So I actually have a couple of USB devices formatted to ext3. There
are also potential security issues but they do not apply in my
situation.

On a typical PS3 with current/near current firmware and YDL 6.2, the
first usb drive is /dev/sda and you'd use it like any other hard disk
device in linux ie fdisk it to partition first, and something like
mke2fs to put a filesystem on a partition. There is also gparted which
has a gui but I can't recall if it does the filesystem for you as
well, or if it is in YDL by default, actually. You may find this handy
if you don't like fdisk.

You can partition and format a usb drive that way on any other
usb-capable linux machine, I believe. I have certainly formatted a few
usb drives to ext3 on my x86 linux and used them on my PS3 to make
backups with no problems.

Macs (OSX) however do not have the ext3 filesystem. There is a kext
that exists which apparently allows you to read and write ext2 and
possibly read ext3 but I do not know how reliable this is or where
exactly to find it. I believe there is also a linux kernel module
which you can compile in to allow you to read the mac filesystem but
that again would be something I have not tried.

Once its all set up, YDL has an automount daemon running usually by
default which essentially makes using USB storage devices just plug
and play, basically, for simple things.

Bottom line: FAT32 usb devices (ie what they are by default usually)
may be all you need, but if large file sizes or more control is needed
you may need a unix type file system. Hope this helps.

> Robert A. Black

Robert Spykerman

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chown -R us ./base