Need help with 1 tb mass storage device with linux

[Thomas Milne]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 8:16 PM, Dave Germiquet <davegermiquet-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hi, Fellow Tlugers
>
> I need a large external hard disk for back up and its proofing a
> little tricky that it need to be. The hard disk will be attached to a
> system running Red Hat 5.2. I have already bought two and not having
> any lack.
>
> I currently have a LANTEC  NexStar.CX  - that is all the labelling it
> has, and a 1TB hard disk inside. When I plug it in to the USB port and
> power on the drive, the hard disk come up - can tell that from the
> sound and LED lighting up, but there is no activity on the host. What
> I mean by this is, I can not see a new entry under dev directory, the
> dmesg is silent. In all way, its as if nothing was attached.

Do tail -f /var/log/messages, then plug the drive in. Do you see anything?

Also try fdisk -l

> I have counter checked by plugging in a flash disk and it get mounted
> immediately, so the problem is not on the host side. It must be
> something to do with the external drive. Now, is there anything I can
> do to force the operating system to be aware of it?

In my experience (limited), it could be that the drive simply has not
been formatted yet, so there is nothing to mount. Try opening up
gparted and see if you can access it that way.

> If there is nothing I can do about the above, does any once have
> experience with a 1 TB external drive that works reliably under Linux?
> I am fine with both USB2 or IEEE 1394b. Ideally, the hard disk should
> be doing 7200 rpm, but would still pick up a 5400 rpm if it work well
> with Linux. Any assistance would be highly appreaciated
>
> Regards,
>
> Dave
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