Re: [gentoo-user] FreeAgent USB drive

[Mark Knecht]

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 11:20 AM, James <wireless@×××××××××××.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a FreeAgent(Seagate) usb drive, that shows up as /medea/sdb1
> in Konqueror. I can go thru it via Konqueror and see all of the files
> (dll .exe, docs etc) but I cannot cd into the directories and sub
> directories and see any files.
>
> The kernel I use (2.6.24-gentoo-r7) has NTFS r/w enabled and fat fs too.
> It works fine with most usb/ntfs devices. I also have ivman installed
> as well as dbus and hald.
>
> I've googled and folks talk about FreeAgent usb drive not being too
> linux friendly. The advise ranges from reformat the drive to patching
> the kernel to deal with it "auto-shut-down".
>
> I'd be curious how folks on this list use a free agent usb drive with Gentoo.
>
> If possible, I'd like to keep it with it's windows features and be able
> to move it seemlessly between doz and gentoo system, as a general purpose
> backup/restore/archive drive.
>
>
> Ideas and comments are most welcome.
>
>
> James

I have multiple external USB drives that I use with this kernel.
However I do have a couple that don't seem to work so well. My clue is
to look at dmesg with the drive attached and then again after the
drive is first attached. In the case of a good drive I'm going to get
a bunch of messages about the drive and its partitions. Look carefully
at the device name

/dev/sda
/dev/sdb

etc.

Then look at the partitions the USB driver is finding on the drive:

/dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb2

Once you see those you're good to go.

fdisk -l /dev/sdb

will list the partitions and give you sizes, etc.

For drives that don't work I get messages about the drive is
stabilizing and the system is waiting. If that happens nothing I've
found so far makes that drive work on that system.

Hope this helps,
Mark
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