[GLLUG] Trouble Accessing external UDB hard drives from Western Digital

[David Mogle]

I have an external drive that automounts at boot - I just made an
fstab entry for the external drive.  If it isn't plugged in at boot it
fails gracefully and you can mount it after plugging it in by running
'mount -a' as root - this causes the machine to try to mount every
device listed in fstab.  I prefer this method over the system's
automount because the mount point isn't always consistent (I use
Ubuntu with Gnome) - this way I always know where my drive is located
in the filesystem.

I second Bryan's opinion to use an ext filesystem rather than NTFS -
if you won't be using these drives on a Windows machine there's not
much point in using NTFS.  It's strange that it won't recognize the
filesystem though.  Are you sure the drive is formatted?

The mount command and fstab seem intimidating at first, but they
really aren't too bad.  I bet you'll be up and running in no time.
Good luck!

-D. Mogle

On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Bryan Laur <bjlaur at mtu.edu> wrote:
> Hi dan,
>
> automounting on Linux distributions can be done different ways, and I don't
> know what method OpenSUSE uses (if any) to do so.
>
> If all else fails, you should just mount the partition manually.
> http://lmgtfy.com/?q=mount+ntfs+partition+linux
>
> something like this:
> mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/ntfs
>
>
> http://linuxconfig.org/How_to_mount_partition_with_ntfs_file_system_and_read_write_access
>
>
>
> Now, since these are both primarily linux drives, I would not use ntfs on
> either of them.
>
> Therefore, run gparted and format both drives to ext4.
> (install gparted first if necessary)
>
>
> For permanent drives, the typical way to mount-on-boot is to use fstab.
> wiki has good documentation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab
> There are also hundreds of guides on google.
>
>
> As far as automounting the non-permanent USB drive, I am not really sure of.
> You could use hotplug or something.
> You could also add it to fstab assuming it will be plugged in on boot.
> (Or, I think if you just run `mount` afterwards with no arguments it'll
> mount it automatically? not sure on that one.)
>
>
>
> On 10/14/2011 9:27 AM, dburk at ws6transam.org wrote:
>>
>> Good Morning,
>> First post to the list.
>>
>> I'm Dan, a relatively new Linux user who is trying to help out the MSU
>> seismic department. I bumped into the project (of all things) because of a
>> craigslist ad for a log I was trying to get rid of, and they found out
>> that I was an ex-USAF seismic analyst! Well I got the time at the moment,
>> and used to really enjoy working with seismic data, and so far it's been
>> pretty fun to help out the college with this project. They even taped a
>> little sign up on the door and made me the official "NERSP engineer",
>> which sounds a lot like NERD, or nurse...but hey.
>>
>> I'm trying to create a useful, researchable subsurface data collection
>> that is comprised of seismic data from Northeastern Russia located on
>> about 1500 CDROMs. The data needs to be converted from a Windows-based
>> Russian seismic format into a standardized format called "SAC". The first
>> thing I'm doing is indexing the whole collection, then getting it off the
>> CDROMS and into a directory structure. Each disc contains about 4000
>> files, so we're talking about six million+ files that will need to be
>> converted. The standard data format is based on the Linux platform, which
>> is good, I think. I need to work on an automated conversion routine that
>> takes the data, validates the timing (and corrects if necessary), then
>> splits each file into four SAC files which represent the various
>> seismometers from the dataset. I figure the process will require a mixture
>> of Bourne shell scripting, PERL, and C code.
>>
>> I've got a book coming on PERL scripting (which I've never done before)
>> and I'm going to have to brush up on my C coding, which I haven't done in
>> like, fifteen years.
>>
>> I'm using OpenSUSE version 11.4 with KBE on my home machine (which is
>> supposed to be a mirror of the university computer), and at the
>> university, I run OpenSUSE version 11.2 with GNOME.
>>
>> I need to get this data off the CD-ROMs and onto a couple of hard drives.
>> So yesterday I had delivered two drives: An internal SATA 2 Tb drive, and
>> an external 3TB USB 2/USB3 drive from Western Digital that I'll use for
>> offsite backup. Now, I've plugged in USB flash drives into this computer
>> with no problems, and I've even used a USB external drive (300 GB)
>> successfuly, and they have auto-mounted. However this new WD drive doesn't
>> mount properly. It's coming up in Linux as /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1 when I
>> look at it in YAST / Partitioner, but the os isn't identifying the format
>> as NTFS. At this point I am feeling rather confused with the whole thing.
>> I have NOT yet tried to plug in the 2 TB internal drive as I don't have
>> the SATA cable... The university forgot to order that part and I'll have
>> to pick one up at Digilink. I am hoping that I don't have a similar
>> auto-mounting problem with this drive.
>>
>> I've checked over the OpenSUSE user forums, and have not seen any similar
>> problems or solutions. I thought maybe I'd check into the local group
>> here, say hello, and seeing as I'm jumping into this Linux with both feet,
>> figure I might as well get involved a bit. Is there anyone local here in
>> the Lansing area that can help me figure out how to access this drive? I'm
>> going to need this storage space pretty soon, as I am halfway through
>> indexing the CDROMS, and will soon want to start moving the data.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> -Dan Burk
>> Haslett, MI
>> 517-388-2875
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> linux-user mailing list
>> linux-user at egr.msu.edu
>> http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user
>
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