installing an externial HD

**[AN]Dracowolf** · 08-30-2003, 02:06 AM

I am trying to install an external HD onto my computer where I have Knoppix installed on the HD.

the drive is a Maxtor 80GIG USB 2.0 drive

when I plug it in before I boot the computer the computer sees the drive, but will not let me mount the drive to access it. It talks about the filesystem type could not be determined.

if someone could help me I would like that.

**garyng** · 08-30-2003, 02:25 AM

has it been formatted ?

**[AN]Dracowolf** · 08-30-2003, 02:35 AM

yes.... its formatted for FAT32

I have ran it on WIN98, WINXP and Mac os 9.2

**garyng** · 08-30-2003, 02:48 AM

what did cat /proc/partitions tell ?

**[AN]Dracowolf** · 08-30-2003, 03:07 AM

I am not sure on the termnology that you used.

I have it formated as 1 80 gig FAT32 hard drive

I use it for image editing and carying files between school and home

**[AN]Dracowolf** · 08-30-2003, 03:13 AM

well when I r- click on the drive it and select properties it says that it has that error, I can not get anyinformation about it

**HedRat** · 08-30-2003, 02:55 PM

I have a generic USB 2.0 hdd drive caddy and hdd and it didn't take too much effort to get it to work (IANA guru).

First I made a directory to mount to. This was simply /mnt/usbhdd. Then I tested it out with
# mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbhdd

no problems. I found the device following some suggestions elsewhere on this forum. It was too much hassle entering this each time I started the laptop, so I added the following to the bottom of my /etc/fstab...

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbhdd vfat defaults,rw,user 0 0

(remember to include a carriage return at the end of the file or it won't work)

One annoying thing is that the drive must be connected before I start the laptop (this includes mounting manually).

After that it was a simple shortcut to the new hard disk directory on the desktop. It's a FAT32 partition like yours, and it appears to have no probs. The speed is fine, even going over a USB 1.0 port.

Hope this helped.

HedRat