External USB Disk - NTFS Mount

In my last post I eluded to purchasing an Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme external hard-drive and was woefully disappointed in the inability to mount it from Linux and gain write permissions. This is how I resolved it for Debian 4.0 - AMD64 distro.

I 'fixed' this by reformatting the drive as a FAT32 file system which technically resolved the issue, but FAT32 didn't support my needs as I needed to store large files (5+ Gigs) on the drive.

I later found that if I installed the ntfs-3g driver and mounted it using this file system type that I could in fact read and write to the drive.

# vi /etc/apt/sources.list

Adding this line:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main

Followed by:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install ntfs-3g

then, define the mount point and edit the /etc/fstab as follows:

# mkdir /media/usbdisk

and add this line to /etc/fstab

/dev/sdc1       /media/usbdisk    ntfs-3g    rw,user,noauto  0       0

# mount /media/usbdisk

Ta-Da.

Seagate FreeAgent External USB Disk

I should really learn; I had a moment of weakness and impulse purchased a Seagate FreeAgent 500Gb external usb disk drive. I needed an external drive to 'sneaker net' between work and home. I often do significant work at home to avoid the dreaded 'information technology' security policies that prevent any common person from performing their job. If I'm not careful, this will quickly work into a rant about IT.

Anyway, I walked into my neighborhood MicroCenter and debated between a few external usb drives of similar prices. I left with the Seagate not paying any attention to the supported operating systems...hell, they always identify flavors of Windows and an occasional Mac, few vendors recognize Linux but no worries....should work fine.

Well, Linux mounted it read-only because it encountered the following error (from dmesg):

scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 2
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
 Vendor: Seagate   Model: FreeAgent XTreme  Rev: 4113
 Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 04
scsi 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
usb-storage: device scan complete
SCSI device sda: 976773168 512-byte hdwr sectors (500108 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sda: 976773168 512-byte hdwr sectors (500108 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda: sda1
sd 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sda
NTFS driver 2.1.27 [Flags: R/W MODULE].
NTFS-fs warning (device sda1): parse_options(): Option iocharset is deprecated. Please use option nls= in the future.
NTFS volume version 3.1.
NTFS-fs error (device sda1): load_system_files(): $LogFile is not clean.  Mounting read-only.  Mount in Windows.

I resolved by deleting the NTFS partition, create a new primary partition of FAT32 as follows:

# fdisk /dev/sda1
d 1
n p 1
w
q
# mkdosfs -vF 32 /dev/sda1

No longer NTFS, but at least I can mount it from Windows or Linux. Kept me from throwing it through the window.

I See Windows FS

Ok, sure...it sounded better in my head; a pun on "I see dead people". But once down, I have to admit, it is pretty lame. Too bad! Besides, if you are a reader of this blog you're already aware that I'm humor-impaired.

Being a long-time Linux user I've encountered the daunting decision during an installation....should I make the Windows partition visible from Linux? Most of the time, the answer to this question is a 'hard' _no_. My current computer has Debian installed, and the question was again presented during the installation and I chose, once again, no. Unfortunately, I've recently found a desire to make the partition available for file transfers and manually updated my system to make the partition available. I decided to document the steps of this effort, just for fun.

- Step 1 -- determine the file system identifier for the Windows partition

$ cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
.
.
.
# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/hda1
title Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1
.
.
.


Note: a more appropriate means to get the same information would be:

# /sbin/fdisk -l


- Step 2 -- update your fstab


$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
#
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hdb5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdd /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom2 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/winXp/ ntfs uid=1000,gid=100,umask=0022 0 0


- Step 3 -- create the mount point

# mkdir /mnt/winXp


- Step 4 -- mount the file system

# mount /mnt/winXp


- Step 5 -- pat yourself on the back
(pat, pat)