Looking for linux firewire driver

[questio verum]

I've got an old 30 gig WD external firewire hdd laying around that I'd like to put back into service under linux. It's a wd300a001-rnn to be exact. The drive was originally installed under win98se and when the os went south, so did access to all my data. Nothing wrong with the drive, it's just that WD's windows drivers required the drive to be formatted during the driver install process, and until now I haven't been willing to let that data go.

A search here and out on the web doesn't turn up a single hit for "wd300a001-rnn linux driver". Anyone know of a native linux driver for this drive? I also have a WD pci-to-firewire adapter that I need support for too. THX!

qv

[Juan Pablo]

Firewire is an open standard, the kernel itself has full support for Firewire. Any modern distro should do it

[questio verum]

Forgive my ignorance. Maybe I'm phrasing this wrong. When I run the Kubuntu hardware database app, my machine appears to see the controller card, but not the drive. The drive is plugged in & turned on. The sparse references I've been able to find tell me I need a linux driver for the hdd. If it makes any difference, the drive and card are both 2000 vintage, western digital. They saw about a month of use, then were boxed up until last week.

I've continued to search other sources for info, but don't seem to be having any luck. WD has never been too keen on offering support for this combo, even when it was new. If you could just point me to a pertinant resource, I would be grateful.

qv

[pavlo_7]

Try this. First boot the system, then plug in the drive. Wait for a few seconds, then, in terminal, type:

fdisk -l

and see if the drive shows up there. If it does, then mount it manually (with "mount" command).

[questio verum]

I tried fdisk, but as you can see, it only shows the two ide drives I have plugged in.

user@user-desktop:~$ sudo fdisk -l
Password:

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 9494 76260523+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 9495 9729 1887637+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 9495 9729 1887606 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/hdb: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 9728 78140128+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
user@user-desktop:~$

This website holds the most pertinant data I've been able to find so far, but it's a two year old archive. It states that ieee1394, ohci1394, and sbp2 modules are required in order to install and use a firewire drive. Is this the kernel level support you were talking about, Juan Pablo?


qv

[Juan Pablo]

Yes, these are the modules, maybe they are already installed, try this

modprobe ieee1394


Check the end of the dmesg command

[questio verum]

I ran modprobe ieee1394 from root, as root, and got no response. Ran it from the default user directory and got the same thing. Could it be that the support is there, but just not enabled?

qv

[questio verum]

Oh yeah... out of curiousity, I ran a search for those three module names under "Find Files/Folders" on K menu. ieee1394 came back with a dozen or so hits, and most of them with what looked like valid file sizes (4096kb). The other two, ohci1394 and sbp2, came back with three hits each, all of with reflected 0kb file sizes.

qv

[pavlo_7]

I ran modprobe ieee1394 from root, as root, and got no response.

That may be because the module is already loaded. You can check if it's in the loaded modules list:

lsmod | grep 1394

or
try to load it this way:

modprobe --first-time ieee1394

which should complain if the module is already loaded:

FATAL: Module ieee1394 already in kernel.

[pavlo_7]

Then, see if this shows anything:

cat /proc/scsi/scsi