USB hard drive with Linux?

[Steven Raymond]

Compusa is selling an "Acom" brand 40GB USB2.0/1.1 external hard drive for about $50 after rebates. This price is a lot lower than say a ZIP drive and tremendously higher capacity. I bought one and am trying to get it to work with RH7.2. Could use some
help understanding Linux & USB.
I _think_ that it is being recognized and drivers being loaded from the following output:
[root@sparky root]# cat /proc/bus/usb/devices
<snip>
T: Bus=01 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=01 Cnt=02 Dev#= 3 Spd=12 MxCh= 0
D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=0c0b ProdID=b001 Rev=11.10
S: Manufacturer=DMI
S: Product=USB 2.0 Storage Adaptor
S: SerialNumber=0B02014204448CD3
C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 2 Atr=c0 MxPwr= 98mA
I: If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 3 Cls=08(stor.) Sub=06 Prot=50 Driver=usb-storage
E: Ad=01(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 64 Ivl=0ms
E: Ad=82(I) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 64 Ivl=0ms
E: Ad=83(I) Atr=03(Int.) MxPS= 2 Ivl=32ms
[root@sparky root]#

According to this link, the driver "usb-storage" will create the drive as /dev/sda (assuming no other SCSI devices are installed):
http://www.linux-usb.org/USB-guide/x498.html


I presume the first task on order is to fdisk it and make a partition. This seemed to go well and the partition I created on /dev/sda1 persists across reboots.

Wouldn't the next task be to create a filesystem on /dev/sda1?
I tried /sbin/mke2fs /dev/sda1 and it runs for awhile, gets to the part about making inodes and hangs at about 577/1024. Thought I wasn't patient enough so I let it run overnight and it didn't
get any further (fdisk was still "hung").

Any help or suggestions in getting this to work under RH7.2 would be appreciated. I have it working under Windows98 just fine. I have read about some usbide drivers but don't understand when or whether these are needed, given the output of cat /proc/bus/usb/devices above (doesn't that mean I already have drivers loaded?)
http://bravin.home.cern.ch/bravin/usbide/usbide.html

Does it stand to reason that if fdisk is working fine, that I can create a partition which fdisk can read later, that all the drivers are working correctly and it is now just a matter of correctly creating a file system & mounting? Could I format it as FAT32 under windows and then just mount it under Linux? I'd rather format as ext2 or 3 to preserve the file attributes, etc. but that keeps failing.

Thanks!






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