new user - need help

[jatt]

ok i think this is the sanctuary for windows users i believe. well i think i ran into a registry error. my laptop goes into a continuous cycle of reboot. just as the welcome screen is about to load it reboots it self. i called tech support at toshiba they advised me the only thing that I can do is to re-format and start from scratch. easier said than done, i need my data =]

so after bitching and moaning i tried seeking some advice from people, and they said download knoppix. also buy an external hard drive and save your files.

ok so i downloaded knoppix, bought an external harddrive. but things arent that simple.

i have no idea how to "see" my external hard drive on the knoppix desktop. I did a little search and it said something about file name w/ sda or along those lines. on my desktop i see no file name. there are three icons one for floppy ( i dont have a floppy, hard disk partition (my laptop harddrive), and cd rom.

how can i "see" my external hard drive?

how can i write to it?

thanks very much in advance. i appreciate the help and in dire need of it.

[firebyrd10]

Boot without the drive plugged in, then when fully booted plug it in and you should see sda1

click that.

Now right-click the icon for it and go to actions -> change read/write mode.

[firebyrd10]

double post

[jatt]

Boot without the drive plugged in, then when fully booted plug it in and you should see sda1

click that.

Now right-click the icon for it and go to actions -> change read/write mode.

same thing without the drive plugged in. the drive is a seagate 120gb. laptop is a toshiba satellite.

[Markus]

Is the drive partitioned and formatted?
What are the last line of dmesg when you've plugged it in?

[jatt]

Is the drive partitioned and formatted?
What are the last line of dmesg when you've plugged it in?

the drive is out of the box from seagate. i havent formatted / partitioned it. and i didnt receive a message when i plugged it in

[Markus]

What are the last lines of the command dmesg ?
You should get something along the lines of:
usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using address 2
ub: sizeof ub_scsi_cmd 60 ub_dev 924
uba: device 2 capacity nsec 50 bsize 512
uba: was not changed
uba: uba1
usbcore: registered new driver ub

My drive is attached now as uba and the partition is found at /dev/uba1. If your's attached as sda, post the output of sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

[jatt]

i get no out put when i type sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

[jatt]

when i type dmesg. it gives me a really long output but the last line doesnt match. the last line is

eth0: link down

[rrfish72]

Does he have to install the imm module with modconf? Like for a zip drive. I didn't get anything showing for sda until I installed imm module.