Musings

I recently purchased a Maxtor One Touch II external hard drive to use for backups with my Linux and Windows boxes. Since I’m going to use rsync (using cygwin on Windows) for backups, I don’t care about the one touch functionality.

So I followed the excellent advice from Harish Narayanan and that seems to work fine. Thanks Harish! I’m using Fedora Core 4 with kernel version kernel-2.6.13-1.1532_FC4.

Plug in the external drive. It should be detected and mounted to /media/usbdrive automatically by the machine. You should do all this as root:

# su

You can check if it is there by running dmesg, using the tail to get only the last part. It should show up as /dev/sda1.

# dmesg | tail

You can check for this by running

# dmesg | grep Maxtor
Vendor: Maxtor Model: OneTouch II Rev: 023g


Now you want to reformat the drive, using fdisk

# /sbin/fdisk /dev/sda1

Once in fdisk, look for the partition tables by hitting ‘p’, then delete them using ‘d’, then write this to disk using ‘w’. You will get an error message, but don’t worry. The new partition will be written. Harish says to reboot at this point, but I think all you have to do is unmount the drive using

umount /media/usbdrive

and then unplug and then plug it back in.

At this point, you can then format it correctly, using

# /sbin/mkfs -t ext3 -j /dev/sda1

and wait for it to format as an ext3 filesystem.

At this point, I am stopping, because I don’t think you need to create a /mnt/external at all. You can just count on Fedora Core 4 to autodetect it as /media/usbdrive and write to that when you connect it.

In a later post, I will talk about rsync and how to use it to back up disks.

Update: actually rdiff-backup looks substantially easier to use and seems to have all the features I need. Later post will discuss that.