How to detect portable USB HD ?

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: How to detect portable USB HD ?
started by: humpty

Posted by humpty on Mar. 22 2006,23:53

DSL's 'plu-n-play' detection works fine for USB pendrives
plugged in after boot time. But won't detect my 2.5 inch USB hard disks.

I have tried modprobe ehci-hcd before plugging them in.
The partitions seem to appear as sdb1..4 etc but upon
mounting gives : mount: /dev/sb1 is not a valid block device.

(Most of the HD casings use Myson chips some of them are GL.)

Posted by anaconda on Mar. 23 2006,06:41

Try to use the full mount command (as root)

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1

and remember to make the directory /mnt/sdb1 first if it doesn't exist

And if you know that the filesystem type is fat32 you can add "-t vfat" between mount and /dev.. Or with ntfs "-t ntfs"

if /dev/sdb1 isn't in /etc/fstab -file the short verdion of mount-command doesn't work.

Posted by humpty on Mar. 23 2006,23:17

No, that didn't work either but I found out what it was.

Apparently not all of my USB drives had 255 heads. Of those that did DSL 2.1 recognised them all. Of those that didn't, DSL 2.1 didn't like them but continued to recognise the 255 head drives.

DSL 2.2..2.3rc did not like some of the drives wether 255 heads or not. Upon not reading one, all other drives on that mount thereon are not recognised.

Well, at least I have a solution of sorts, I change all my drives to 255 heads and revert back to 2.1.