Kaj Haulrich wrote:
On Thursday 17 March 2005 17:16, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
Mr. Geek wrote:
Kaj; I think Anne has the right idea. I have several clients
using external USB drives instead of other types of backup
drives/media. Many of them came partitioned and pre-formatted
as FAT32, but Diskdrake made fast work of it.
One thing you should consider though, is that it helps
sometimes to delete the mount-point folder right after you
unmount the drive and before you attempt to delete the FAT32
partition.
Your problem may have something to do with that. If not, then
this will make sure that drive access and permissions are
updated at the least.
If necessary, go to the harddrive manufacturer's website and
download their diagnostics tools. Some like Maxtor have a
bootable ISO image you can download and use to reformat the
drive back to factory standards. Others have the same type of
tools which can be run from a bootable floppy diskette.
Worst-case, you can remove the hard drive from it's USB case
and temporarily connect it as a slave drive on your Linux box.
Once Diskdrake sees the drive you can proceed normally and
delete and create new partitions and re-format the drive the
way you prefer.
Your problem might also be that the circuitry in the USB box
itself may have either a hardware or software 'Lock' system.
Check your owners manual for the USB box to see if it does.
Once more possibility is that the controller chip in the USB
case does not support Linux, but I find that highly unlikely.
IN all cases, you'll have to unmount the drive from diskdrake
to begin the process, so keep that in mind.
One problem you run into with the tools from the drive
manfacturer is that most of them do not enable USB support, so
they will not even see the drive. This will hopefully change as
externel USB and Firewire drives become more popular, but for
now, you just about have to create a special boot disk if you
want to work on something other then a IDE of SCSI drive.
(OpenDOS has some nice boot disks...)
Mikkel
Thanks Mikkel, but you see I just don't have a Windows boot disk.
Neither have my daughter, who has a WinXP box. I tried to figure
out a way to let her Windows (DOS) format the external harddisk,
but gave it up, 'cause there is no point in it : I still can't get
a decent file system on it, no matter what. Maybe NTFS is usable
but then I can't write to it from my Linux box, the whole idea
being to use it as a transport medium and backup between the two
boxes.
Well, I can still use my camera for transport....
Kaj haulrich.
The tools from the drive manfacturer are their own boot disk. You usualy
download a program that creates the floppy. Then boot with the floppy.
Or, if you don't like having the larger collection of floppies, you
download the Ultimate Boot CD from http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ and
boot with that when you need the tools.
Mikkel
--
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for you are crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
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