New drive

[Rick Stevens]

Mark Knecht wrote:
> On 4/15/05, Scott Mertens <smertens at mho.com> wrote:
> 
>>On Fri, 2005-04-15 at 10:08 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>
>>>On 4/15/05, Scott Mertens <smertens at mho.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>I have just bought a new SATA HD and installed with the DOS software
>>>>included with it.  It was formatted as FAT32, I think I will use as a
>>>>backup for this linux box.  My intention is to boot into a Ghost CD and
>>>>image drive to new Drive.
>>>>
>>>>So question is is it OK to be formatted to FAT32 to copy an ex3 image
>>>>file to it.  Or should I mount it in Linux, format it as a ext3 and then
>>>>boot to Ghost and copy the image file to it?
>>>
>>>Actually it's pretty bad to be formatted FAT32 in this application. If
>>>you copy Linux files per se to the drive then since FAT32 doesn't
>>>support owner:group:world permissions and you'll lose that info and
>>>have a terrible time doing a restore.
>>
>>This is good to know!
>>
>>>Much better to format it ext3 and take advantage of the journaling for
>>>extra safety.
>>
>>Now I have to try to do some research to see how to mount and where?  I
>>have only one other drive, also SATA that RH is seeing as SCSI
>>
>>>My 2 cents,
>>
>>Ana a bargain at that rate!
> 
> 
> Well, there we go again with that 'strange hardware' stuff we talked
> about earlier. SATA drives are typically seen as SCSI devices so,
> assuming you have NO other SCSI in the system you might try (as root)
> 
> fdisk /dev/sda
> 
> and see what happens. If you find the drive (look carefull at the size
> it's reporting to make sure you think it's the right drive) then type
> 'q' to quit, for now. At that point you're ready to do some
> partitioning and formating. If not found then there's two or more
> reasons:
> 
> 1) Your kernel doesn't have SATA support. (There you go, building
> kernels again!) ;-)
> 
> 2) Your kernel doesn't have SCSI support, or it must be loaded as a module.
> 
> 3) There is some other SCSI device at sda. Try fdisk /dev/sdb or sdc
> etc. and jsut poke around a bit, but be very careful with fdisk.
> 
> A more formal way to look for the drive would be to run dmesg in a
> terminal and see if you can spot the system findign a SCSI drive
> during boot.

I think you missed that, Mark.  His current drive (SATA) is being seen
as SCSI (which, as you point out, makes perfect sense as SATA drives
are treated as SCSI).

Scott, SCSI, SATA, and damned near any storage media you can plug into
USB or firewire are all treated by Linux as SCSI devices.  Why?  Because
SCSI is the most flexible way of dealing with disparate devices.

The first SCSI (or media treated as SCSI) by the kernel is assigned the
device name "/dev/sda" (SCSI disk "a").  The second will be "/dev/sdb"
(SCSI disk "b") and so on.  The odds are that your current SATA drive
(which contains your operating system) is /dev/sda.  The second one will
most likely be /dev/sdb.

Mark's idea of using fdisk is logical.  If you do "fdisk -l /dev/sda",
you should see a summary of how big the drive is as well as the
partition table on it.  Similarly, you should be able to do an "fdisk -l
/dev/sdb" and see a similar thing, but you'll probably only see one
partition that's listed as "W95 FAT32".
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-            The gene pool could use a little chlorine.              -
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