[ale] simple question

[Geoffrey]

Sean Kilpatrick wrote:
> Trying to make backups easier.
> Got a 160 GB hard drive and stuffed it into a USB external
> box. Plugged it in and ran fdisk and partioned the drive with
> one Primary partition; then formatted it with
> the -c switch to check for bad blocks.  Hoo, boy, was that
> a time consuming mistake on a USB (2) connection! Had to
> let the thing run all night.
> Now all I need to do is check to make sure how big is the 
> single partition on the drive.
> but when I try to mount the drive I get this:
> 
> [root at localhost backup]# mount -t ext3 /dev/sda /mnt/backup
>   mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda,
>   or too many mounted file systems.
> 
> The command I used to format the drive was this:
>     mke2fs -cjm0 /dev/sda1
> which _should_ have formatted the drive with ext3 as the fs. At
> least that's how I comprehended the man page.
> 
> So what do I have to do to mount this drive?

I'm guessing it might be showing up as a different usb device now.  Try 
the following:

fdisk -l /dev/sda
fdisk -l /dev/sdb
.
.
fdisk -l /dev/sdz

Or until you're satisified. :)

> 
> And then I think I am back to a question that was asked earlier
> this week.  How do I make the OS consistently identify this drive
> as sdc1 rather than sd?1, which it is doing now, depending on
> how many other USB "storage devices" have been plugged in before
> it?
> I have this line ready to activate in /etc/fstab:
> 
>     #/dev/sdc1  /mnt/backup  ext3 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
> 
> And if that isn't correct I would really appreciate a correction
> _before_ I screw something up any further.

Has nothing to do with your entry in fstab, unfortunately.  You're going 
to have to look at either hotplug or udev, depending on your kernel. 
Personally, I've found nothing but frustration when trying to get this 
to work on older kernels.  On SuSE 9.2 it just works.  Sweet.

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey