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Seagate 6.0GB USB 2.0 Pocket drive (for which I traded a turntable).

Using a USB-storage kernel and modules I could mount this drive as 
/dev/sda1 and look at the contents.

Comes with Windows software on the drive (autorun.inf, st_lic~.txt, 
toolkit.exe and usersg~1 (with a bunch of .htm files and images).
There are 1896K of files on the disk.

Unmounted it again in order to partition.

BL2 fdisk showed no partitions, just free space 6GB.

Partitioned to 500MB and a 3GB ext2 partitions labelled by fdisk as sda11 
and sda12.   Wrote to the fat table and quit fdisk.

BL2 does not provide these devices so I made them after looking up the 
major and minor numbers.  /dev/sda1 is b 8 1
mknod /dev/sda11 b 8 11
mknod /dev/sda12 b 8 12

These are not yet valid block devices and cannot be mounted until I format 
them with mke2fs, which does not work.

mke2fs /dev/sda11 (or sda12)
'No such device or address while trying to determine filesystem size.'

15 hits on this error message.  I cannot use mke2fs on sda11 while sda1 is 
mounted.  I unmounted it.  Still does not work.

One hit on 'mke2fs /dev/sda11' in French - mke2fs worked in Debian.

I tried the BL2 (SW) mke2fs first, then the busybox 1.3.2 version (mke2fs 
1.38 Jun 30 2005) which 'Could not determine filesystem size'.  This 
drive is 2006.  My USB add-in card is USB 1.0.

I wanted to copy BL3 and BL2 to this external drive to move them between 
computers at different locations (and computers without ethernet - this 
one ran out of expansion slots after I replaced dead onboard USB).

fdisk -l lists four partitions each on /dev/hda and /dev/hdb but nothing 
about sda.  And a 'FATAL ERROR:  Cannot open disk drive'.

If I mount /dev/sda1 df says it is still 5.8GB 0% use.

This is a small round thing that looks the diameter of a laptop drive, so 
I assumed it was actually a scsi hard disk with USB connection, like our 
rectangular model (which needs an external power supply).

Maybe it is just a round case with 6GB flash memory in it.  The flash 
memory sticks also come with software on them and are detected as 
/dev/sda1.  (I don't recall what the other external drive was).


USB Flash Memory HOWTO
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Flash-Memory-HOWTO/

This document describes procedures for installing USB Flash Memory devices 
and the way of formatting them for various file systems such as vfat (the 
way they usually come) and ext2 (the way they fit in better with Linux).

You can make a dual partition system (ext2 and vfat).

"It is assumed that the flash memory is mapped to /dev/sda."

But I have /dev/sda1 (according to the usb-storage module).

I tried 'fdisk /dev/sda'
FATAL ERROR:  Bad primary partition 0:  Partition edns after end-of-disk.

Any ideas other than giving up and copying one large .tgz file to the 
preexisting vfat /dev/sda1 partition?

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org