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

[Bryan Laur]

 > 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.
Ah, yes, mount -a.
I second this.

 > 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?
It's also possible that he doesn't have the ntfs drivers installed.
The fact the /dev/sdb1 shows up means that the system recognizes a 
partition of some kind. (Doesn't it?)

In any case, I've never received an external hard drive that wasn't 
already 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!
x2.



Also, Perl would be my language of choice for the work your describing.
Perl's learning curve is slightly steep at the very beginning because 
the language has some oddities in it.

However, it's a much better option that C for this type of work.
I would do it completely in perl. Mixing languages isn't worth the hassle.