Need help with 1 tb mass storage device with linux

[Jamon Camisso]

Dave Germiquet 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.
> 
> 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?
> 
> 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

I have a Vantec NexStar with a 1TB WD drive, no problems on 2.6.26 or 
2.6.29 (Debian and rolled my own respectively). RHEL is up to 5.3 now 
also and I've done upgrades (admittedly with Centos) without a hitch. 
Check if there's a kernel upgrade you haven't applied? Otherwise, try 
rolling your own kernel.

Also, is your enclosure 2.5" or 3.5"? It makes a difference for the 2.5" 
version, it requires using the supplied cable to plug 2 usb ports into 
the drive for power since one usb port doesn't supply enough juice.

If 3.5", check your udev rules, I've read that with some enclosures that 
there's a vol_id check that fails, so it might pay to hack around your 
60-persistent-storage.rules file. Though I suppose your /dev/disk/by-id/ 
device won't be present if nothing is showing up in dmesg, so..

Jamon
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