Hiya. I've just bought an unformatted external USB hard drive. It plugs in fine and lists as /dev/sda. I've created a partition table with cfdisk, three "Linux" partions (ext3?) and one FAT32. This seems to be fine and when I plug it in, dmesg recognises sda1-sda4. How do I mount it? I've tried mount /dev/sda1 /place but it says I need to specify a filetype. I've tried mount /dev/sda1 /place -t ext3 but that doesn't work either. I've also tried -t msdos for the FAT32 partition, same story. The only one which seems to work at all is mount /dev/sda1 /place -t usbfs but this won't let me write to the drive, permission denied even though I'm root. Clue, please?

Hi!

First concerning the ext3 partitions. Did you format those? You only wrote that you used cfdisk to partition. So possibly you forgot to format using mke2fs -j /dev/sdaX. The -j option is to turn journaling on which essentially makes it ext3 as far as i know.
Concerning the FAT32 partition i once read that you have to tell mount to use vfat as filesystem. Maybe that helps here.

Good luck,
Incommunicado

P.S.: If you have linux questions I can only recommend the Gentoo forums http://forums.gentoo.org/ Plenty of experienced linux people there and a really good forum to search for answers.

Quote: Original post by Incommunicado
Concerning the FAT32 partition i once read that you have to tell mount to use vfat as filesystem. Maybe that helps here.

Actually, he should probably run mkfs.vfat on it first, since it apparently shipped unformatted.

Assuming sda4 is the FAT32 partition, you'll want to run mkfs.vfat on that partition as root.

You'll also want to run mke2fs -j on the other partitions, but I'm sure you know this already.

Oh my! Forgot about formatting the FAT32 partition. Sure it has to be formatted before mounting it using vfat and since he did partition himself any partitioning done by the factory is lost anyway.

Have a nice day,
Incommunicado