Installing an external hard drive on opensuse 10.2

[johnofwhyalla]

I am a newbie to Linux and would like to know how to install my Maxtor One Touch 111 as i only have winxp on the driver disc?

All other usb devices have been found automatically on installation.

[devils casper]

Hi johnofwhyalla,

Welcome to the LinuxForums.

plug-in External Disk and execute 'fdisk -l' command. check if it displays External disk in the output. if it does, create mount_point ( folder ) for each partition of External Disk and mount it.


Casper

[johnofwhyalla]

Hi johnofwhyalla,

Welcome to the LinuxForums.

plug-in External Disk and execute 'fdisk -l' command. check if it displays External disk in the output. if it does, create mount_point ( folder ) for each partition of External Disk and mount it.


Casper

I should have said to start with, this is a stand alone opensuse 10.2, there is no other operating system, i had this external maxtor one touch 111 usb hdd on my pc before my internal hdd clapped out, i have searched for a linux driver without luck.

[oldcpu]

I have quantity 3 maxtor one-touch external hard drives. With the KDE desktop on SuSE-10.0, 10.1 and 10.2, they work fine with USB2 and reasonably fine with firewire. With SuSE running KDE, just plug in the external drive's data cable to your PC. Switch ON the external drive. Within 10 to 45 seconds or so a popop will appear, giving one read access to the drive.

The 500GByte drives that I use, came formated as NTFS. In one case I re-partitioned and reformated it as 2x250 GByte VFAT32 partitions to give me read/write access. For another 500GByte I left the external drive formated as NTFS, and I have read/write to it using Fuse and the NTFS-3G driver.

I did have a (solveable) problem recently with firewire with this drive. I'll write a separate post on this problem.

I have read of Gnome and other (non-KDE) desktop users having some heartburn with the drives NOT being automatically mounted. I don't use those desktops so I do not know if that is a limitation, a bug, or simply user error.

Good luck.

[oldcpu]

I had a bit of a fright a few nights ago (with a happy ending) wrt one of my external (500GByte) Maxtor hard drives.

This 500Gbyte Maxtor External drive has both a USB2 and a Firewire interface. Typically I only use the firewire interface, and I have 3 external Maxtor drives connected in "serial" from one to the other using Firewire interface, to my main PC (with SuSE-10.1 on an athlon-2800+) - which give me 1.25 Terabytes of "offline" storage.

PROBLEM:

That evening I switched ON one of the three Maxtor's, and the power-on "idiot light" in the front did NOT come on, and SuSE did not recognize the drive. I could hear a faint spin up noise on the drive, which suggested the drive was ramping up per normal. But the lack of a power-on "idiot light" suggested something was wrong with the external drive.

I checked all power input. I gave the drive its own dedicated power socket. I even changed out power adapters with another maxtor of the same make. I also checked ALL of the firewire data cables. No joy. The idiot light would not come on (nor would the KDE automount popup appear) no matter how I cycled the ON/OFF switch.

I tried my other external Maxtor drives [one of which is identical in hardware] which were connected (via firewire), through this Maxtor, to my PC. They worked fine with the firewire. They were recognized by SuSE-10.1. So that suggested the Firewire cabling was fine, and that there might be a problem with this un-cooperative external Maxtor drive.

SOLUTION:

Then I remembered the previous evening I had disconnected the external Maxtor drive (that was now giving me problems) and connected it to my wife's Laptop via the external Maxor's USB drive, to copy off GBytes of pictures (that we took while in Berlin over easter). The drive had worked great that evening with USB2. After I was done, I had restored the Firewire cabling.

So after pondering what I did the previous evening, I then, with the external Maxtor drive switched OFF, re-connected it to my main PC via USB2 (instead of firewire). I switched ON the Maxtor, and it worked fine with USB2 !! The power-on "idiot light" came on, and I had a SuSE-10.1 KDE popup that the drive was identified. I had data access via USB2 with no problem.

I then unmounted the drive, switched OFF the drive, changed the USB2 connection back to my original Firewire connection, and I switched the external drive back ON. This time the power-on "idiot light" came ON. I had a SuSE-10.1 KDE popup that the drive was identified. I once again had data access via Firewire to this external drive with no problem.

Why did this happen? Why did firewire stop working for a while? I have no idea. I now remember a friend of mine complain about the behaviour of this external Maxtor drive with WinXP using the firewire interface (and hence he always uses USB2 with the same make of drive). My Laptop also had SuSE-10.1, and maybe in shutting down the laptop, I did something incorrect with unmounting the Maxtor external drive. I don't know, .... I'll be more careful, and take better notes in the future, when using this drive.

Anyway, it works again now. So all is well, that ends well.