External Hard drive
Posts: 22
Hi,
I'm a relative newbie, so forgive me if I'm overly stupid. I've got Mepis 6 working well, have finally made a full transition from windoze today. Most stuff works a treat, but I'm having trouble with my external hard drive (USB - Western Digital). I can access the drive, I can load the files from it and so on. What I can't do is save to it. Everything has to be saved to my main hard drive (which I'd like to avoid) and then moved to the external hard drive. Not a huge problem, but it's pretty annoying.
I've gone to the properties menu and attempted to change the permissions so that user, group and others all have full read and write privileges (I'm not on a network - so I guess that's ok) but the process dialog that comes up just says 'stalled' and does nothing. I'm in the process of ripping my cd collection and this problem is adding a good five minutes to each rip.
Any and all ideas much appreciated
Rich
Samba mount in the fstab?
Posts: 5
Patrick,
That was a very informative answer. After reading this I have a few questions:
1) Could I use this to mount a drive from my debian box at boot instead of having to type:
mount -t smbfs -o username=myusername,password=mypassword //server/Group /home/autouser/Desktop/File_Server
2) And how would that look and work for an fstab entry?
You can do it, but it is a complex procedure
Posts: 26
A little background here:
Any external devices such as Zip drives, card readers, digital cameras, and iPods that plug in to your system are seen as SCSI disks by MEPIS.
SCSI emulation of storage devices has been a part of Linux for many years, and USB devices are no exception. This is necessary so application writers and end users do not have to worry about the details of accessing the USB or parallel ports.
For this reason, your external hard drive is seen as a SCSI disk.
What to do:
If your external drive is the only external device plugged in, your device name for the drive will be /dev/sda.
Your drive is formatted for FAT32 by default, hence you will need to be able to access that drive as a FAT32 partition.
Assuming your drive is named /dev/sda, you will need to open a terminal window (Konsole) and edit /etc/fstab.
In MEPIS, /etc/fstab is divided into two sections. The top half of the file contains the static portion of fstab, or File System Table. Insert a blank line above the comment separating the static from the dynamic portion of the file.
Then inside the blank line, type in the following:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/wdexternal vfat users,noauto,exec,rw 0 0
and save the file. Then type in "mkdir /mnt/wdexternal" to create a mount point for which to mount the external drive. The "rw" in the line tells MEPIS to mount the external drive for read and write access. The "users" tells MEPIS to allow all users access to the drive. "noauto" means do not automatically mount the drive on bootup, and "exec" means you can run applications off the drive.
Next, reboot MEPIS, and create a new hard drive device icon on your desktop, and change the settings to it is linked to /mnt/wdexternal. Close the dialog boxes, and click on the icon. You external disk should automatically mount and you should be ready to use the disk.
Thanks.
Patrick
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