FireWire hard drives

[Derick Centeno]

> Yeah, and a brief, unsolicited word of advice: avoid those eMachines like the 
> plague.  They're just terrible computers, and basically can't be fixed once 
> they blow up--and they do blow up, almost literally.  The entire motherboard 
> on my niece's is fried. 
>
>   
Thanks for the warning.

> How much do you want to bet that if there's a firmware update from Bytecc, it'll only be for MacOS or 
> Windoze?  Meaning I'll probably have to wipe the drive again (I doubt OS X can read ext3). 
>
>   
OS X or Tiger, can see a Linux ext3 partition as an unmounted partition, 
via Disk Utility.
> Well, my Windoze-addled brother would say that I'm punishing her in the 
> old-style Addams Family manner by giving her an iBook running Linux!  

It's fun to share this tiny bit of twisted humor.
> Well, I work in a biology lab (U of M), so some might say I do record-keeping 
> to a fault!  Anytime I see a new command I need to know, I print it out ("man 
> -t [command] | lp".  My Debian notebook is several hundred pages now, with an 
> A-Z tab index.  Anyway, I printed out the article before I started, and 
> cross-checked the output from fdisk and mkfs with the print version--they 
> were exactly the same.
>
>   

Ok!  It seems that you are doing what should be done by habit.  Very 
good.  Sadly, not many persons have developed this kind of disciplined 
procedural approach.
Keep it up!  You'll be surprised when it saves you!
>> If after all that, the drive is not reliable -- it just may be that
>> drive.  One test which will isolate the difficulty further is to apply
>> the exact same above steps to a different drive placed into the same
>> "cheesy" enclosure, and see if Linux reports the drive's existence in
>> the same confusing way.  If Linux reports the drive's existence without
>> any of the "funny stuff" or "guesses"; the problem is unique to that
>> drive.
>>     
>
> See above; USB/FW peripherals seem to always be cursed, at least on my systems 
> (Debian x86 3.1r4 and YDL 4.1).  Using tail and dmesg | grep commands always 
> shows the system thrashing for a while.  But I've never had a problem moving 
> files from Debian/YDL to OS X (flash drive formatted as vfat32).  So things 
> "work", but in a non-ideal manner.
>
>   
Perhaps it is more an issue of sub-standard manufacturing.  Hard to 
tell.  Did you ever try the firewire enclosures prepared by Other World 
Computing (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/usb/eliteclassic)?
>> The difference is that the modification necessary within YDL 4.0 fstab
>> file is not necessary within YDL 4.1.  Why?  Improvements to the Linux
>> kernel are such that the Linux OS can make more assessments
>>     
>
> But--the article at the link says "YDL 4.0", not 4.1:
> http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/support/solutions/ydl_general/firewire.shtml
>
> Apparently by adding /mnt/firewire and then "mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/firewire" 
> you don't need to add anything to /etc/fstab in YDL 4.0 *or* 4.1.  Whereas it 
> looks as though by adding an entry to fstab you mostly save yourself some 
> typing ("mount /dev/sda1").  Do I understand this correctly? 
>
>   
Yes, you save yourself some typing.  It may not be worth the effort, 
apologies if I've been confusing.
As in most things regarding Linux, it depends on your intention 
regarding how often this disk will be used or mounted to this system.
I've forgotten how it was in 4.0 and earlier however in general each 
release of YDL required the modification of fstab less to mount devices.

Hoping that Santa treats you well.

Happy Holidays, Derick.
>