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

Barry Tigner tigner at msu.edu
Fri Oct 14 11:14:30 EDT 2011


Hi,

My recommendations are...

Do it all in perl.

Don't use ntfs, reformat the drive in whatever the 
latest ext file system your system supports.

Be aware that since the data came from "windows"
you will have to worry about converting crlf to lf
or vice-versa.

I work on campus in room 1230 of the Biomedical Physical
Sciences building, or BPS as we call it. I have spare
sata cables if you want to stop by and get one. I am 
a little surprised that the new drive did not come with
one. It sounds like you bought a "bare" drive. 

I worked designing and building production test equipment
for a disk drive company back in the 80's and I can tell
you that today's drives may be bigger, but they don't go
through rigorous testing. I run every drive I buy through a
minimum 24 hour burn in and run the manufacturers low level
diagnostic to verify that the drive does not have problems
out of the box. I am a little paranoid on disk drives, so I
run the manufacturers diagnostic at least 1 or 2 times a 
year after I install it. It takes more work, but it is 
worth it if you find a faulty drive before you use it or
before it fails. Modern drives support S-M-A-R-T , and I
recommend you make sure it is turned on in the bios so 
the drive can keep track internally of its operations.
You can get an open source SMART monitoring application
that you can run periodically to check on the disk drives
SMART status.

Sorry about being so long winded.

Barry



-- 
Barry Tigner
MSU PA Electronics Design and Service Ctr.
1230 BioMedical Physical Sciences
Email: tigner at msu.edu
Phone: 517-884-5538


On Fri, 2011-10-14 at 10:45 -0400, Bryan Laur wrote:
> > 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.
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