[ale] Troubleshooting a USB-Attached disk

[Preston Boyington]

BruceG wrote:
> I purchased a Seagate 40Gig harddrive new in box. I also purchased a
> CompUSA USB carrier supporting 3.5" disk drives. Figured by putting
> the 2 together, I'd be in hog heaven. Didn't quite work that way.
> 
> I connected the Seagate 40 Gig drive to the IDE interface on the
> CompUSA carrier, then connected via a USB port to both my Win2K
> laptop and my SuSE 
> 9.0 desktop. Neither saw the hard drive.
> 
> To start trouble-shooting, would I yank the drive out of the USB
> carrier and pop it in the desktop for kicks and grins? Where would I
> start to make sure the disk drive is good?
> _______________________________________________

for myself, I always boot a knoppix disk and go from there.  that way I am not dependant on my installed software being configured correctly (modules and the like).

boot knoppix
su to root in a terminal
type "qtparted" (no quotes) and see if the disk is recognized.  (you may need to partition/format it so the OS's can see it)

after you are finished checking with QTParted

in the terminal you can do:
mount /dev/sda1
to mount the usb drive (may need to be root)

when you can see it and know it works then go to your other systems and start trouble shooting.

Preston