[ltp] Re: Trying to Mount USB hard drive

[Daniel Pittman]

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Mendel Cooper wrote:
> Thanks, guys, for all the help in mounting a USB flash drive. It's
> working fine now.
> 
> My success with that encouraged me to once again try to mount a 3.5"
> hard drive in a USB enclosure. Hey, I figured I could maybe try
> mounting it on /dev/sda1, just like the flash drive.

...that depends.  Basically, when you plug in a new USB device, a new
SCSI host is added and the next SCSI disk (or cdrom, or tape) device is
allocated.

So, the first USB mass-storage device you plug in will be 'sda', the
second will be 'sdb' and so forth.

/dev/sda is the full disk, which /dev/sda1 is partition one of the disk.

> Well . . . It was about one-quarter part successful. The drive
> mounted, but the system only recognized the first four cylinders of
> it. So, I got 32 usable MB on an 8 GB drive. Even with fdisk, only 32
> MB were accessible.

If you ran 'fdisk' against /dev/sda1, you only saw the size of the first
partition on the disk.  If you ran it against /dev/sda, something is
indeed wrong. :)

> And then that temporarily messed up the USB port. The CDR burner in a
> USB enclosure wasn't recognized. The USB flash drive wouldn't mount. I
> had to do a hardware reset, i.e., a reboot to fix all that up.

That sounds more like something screwed up.  The linux USB list is
probably the best place to go for direct help if you can reproduce the
problem.

They can guide you through making a bug report, which will allow the
issue to be corrected.

> I figure that maybe /dev/sda1 isn't the right device for a USB hard
> drive. Can anyone help on this?

As I said, it depends on when you plug in the device. ;)

After plugging in a new USB mass-storage device, try running the
command:

] dmesg | tail -n 20

One of the messages there should show you which SCSI disk device was
allocated for the new USB device.

          Daniel

-- 
The only place men want depth in a woman is in her décolletage.
        -- Zsa Zsa Gabor