FireWire hard drives

[Paul Higgins]

Hi, Derick:

Happy holidays to you, too, and everyone on the list.  Speaking of the spirit 
of the holiday season, my niece is getting my G3 iBook to replace her cheapo 
eMachines PC that my brother bought her about a year ago, which just blew up.  
Yes, I'm putting YDL on it.  : ) 

As for the FireWire drive, I think I figured out what was going on.  Take a 
look at the log again.  At first the system can't figure out whether there's 
a legit FS, but then it finds it.  The relevant lines are here:

> Dec 23 15:34:49 localhost kernel: EXT3 FS on sda1, internal journal
> Dec 23 15:34:49 localhost kernel: EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with
> ordered data mode.

I'm not sure why the system gets confused at first, but clearly it figures 
things out, as farther down the log you can see that it lists the not only 
the correct FS, but also the correct vendor (Maxtor), drive size (250 GB), 
and interface (ieee1394). 

Anyway, I followed the instructions in that first link exactly, and everything 
went without a hitch.  I'm sure that mkfs was able to make a legit ext3 FS.  
It must have worked as I've been able to back up everything on the old iBook 
so far.  So the drive is basically working, just not as smoothly as I'd like.  
Maybe the kernel just doesn't like the cheesy Chinese-made FireWire enclosure 
I got from my local "whitebox" store...who knows?

The thing that's confusing about that article I linked is that it says to make 
a new entry in both /mnt and /etc/fstab, while the YDL directions say only to 
create a new directory in /mnt and they never mention /etc/fstab.  I wish I 
knew enough Unix to understand why both things can work OK.

It would be nice if Linux could get plug-n-play working a bit more reliably 
when it comes to FireWire and Flash drives.  I find it pretty ridiculous that 
I have to mount a drive from a terminal, as nice as it is to have that 
particular skill.  (To be fair, however, YDL does a better job with Flash 
drives then does my Debian x86 machine at work).  What would be ideal is for 
FireWire and Flash drives to automount once they have been properly 
formatted.  I don't mind using a CLI for formatting/mkfs at all, however.

Now I just need to see if copying over my KMail directory works properly when 
going from YDL 4.0.1 to 4.1.  And that reminds me of another pet peeve: there 
doesn't seem to be any easy way to copy stuff from /home to the FireWire 
drive using the GUI.  I have to use the CLI for that.  It's not that 
difficult, but it is inconvenient.

-PRH

On Saturday 23 December 2006 19:39, Derick Centeno wrote:
> Hi Paul!
>
> I hope that you are enjoying the spirit of the holiday season.
>
> The two documents you referenced are referring to the same procedures
> from a slightly different context.  As regards the output you produced,
> it appears to me that you probably partitioned the drive but forgot to
> format it using the mkfs command.
>
> This line:
>
> Dec 23 15:34:18 localhost kernel: VFS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on
> dev sda.
>
> refers to that problem.
>
> It may be a good idea to run a diagnostic on the drive in question,
> repartition it, then format it using mkfs and proceed from there.
>
> After the above remember to modify the fstab file within the etc
> directory;follow the instructions according to the first document.
> Modifying fstab is done within an editor like vim or ed or gedit or
> joe... essentially any text editor you get comfortable with. Since you
> are going to be doing things with text files -- a lot -- you might as
> well learn either emacs, vim or vi.
>
> Of course, instead of /mnt/data you will enter the name of the
> directory you created which is /mnt/firewire.
>
> Best wishes....I'm going to have myself committed to the home of the
> perpetually nerdy.
>
> Derick.
> _______________________________________________
> yellowdog-newbie mailing list
> yellowdog-newbie at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-newbie