How do I set up an external disk drive?

Have you looked at kwikdisk in the kicker panel the three blue orange and green cubes for your drive ? Depending on the version your running support varies. Patticulars on what youre trying to do may allso be helpful.

jim

is your desktop set to show unmounted drives?
this is one of the things you can set from 'configure desktop' after you right click on the desktop

if that is ok
open a konsole and change to root user (su, enter, wait and give password)
now type
tail /var/log/messages
leave this open
plug in the drive
use up arrow in the konsole, once, to repeat the command and press enter.
you should have something new appear at the bottom of the list.
copy and paste that back here

I setup the desktop to show unmounted drives but still do not see the external harddrive. From my desktop, it looks like I have a total of 4 drives. How do I figure out what these four drives are for? When you say drive, does that also mean parition? I have a 6.3G and 23G mounted. I have a 1K and 1.2G not mounted.

I ran the tail /var/log/messages command first without the external drive plugged in, then I ran it with it plugged in. I did not see anything new at the bottom of the list.

Here are the last few lines when I run the command.

Jul 22 13:53:16 localhost gconfd (Dennis-7952): Resolved address "xml:readonly:/var/lib/gconf/defaults" to a read-only configuration source at position 4
Jul 22 14:07:44 localhost -- MARK --

Thanks, Dennis

this means that the drive has not been recognised by the hal / udev system.
I don't know how to achieve this, but it depends on the module for firewire being loaded
and there being a udev script to load the drive

I bought an external Toshiba USB drive because they were on special offer (cheap) The drive was pre-formatted NTFS and not seen at all by mepis. I had to plug it into a Windows box (there are times when it pays not to have converted ALL your mates to Linux) and delete the NTFS partition. The problem is that I can't remember what I did next so perhaps someone else can chime in to remind us how to put a system on a bare USB drive.
Whatever it was that I did, I have a nice (cheap) 300Gb USB 2 drive on my system.