Initializing drive in USB enclosure

[Andrew Robinson]

Joel Jaeggli wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Andrew Robinson wrote:
> 
> 
>>I have recently acquired a Western Digital EIDE 80 GB hard drive. 
>>Separately, I acquired an external USB enclosure. I would like to get 
>>the hard drive working in the enclosure to provide myself with some 
>>portable disk space.
>>
>>First question: is it possible to initialize a hard drive in an USB 
>>external enclosure? I haven't figured out how to do so from either Linux 
>>or Windows. My suspicion is that I will have to mount the hard drive in 
>>the computer case, initialize it, then remove it and mount it in the 
>>external enclosure.
>>
>>Second question: if it is possible to initialize a hard drive in an USB 
>>enclosure, how to I go about doing so? If anyone has any pointers to 
>>appropriate How-To's, I'd be very appreciative.
> 
> 
> assuming the usb storage controller is supported by linux, slap the drive
> in the box and plug the box into a usb port. assuming everything works
> like it should, can do a dmesg or cat /proc/scsi/scsi in order to see
> where it got installed. probably /dev/sda if you have no other usb-storage 
> serial-ata or scsi disks. Then create a partition on /dev/sda
> using fdisk and do a mkfs.ext3 -c /dev/sda1 and it's ready to mount.
> 

dmesg returns this:

  hub.c: new USB device 00:02.2-5, assigned address 2
  usb.c: USB device not accepting new address=2 (error=-71)
  hub.c: new USB device 00:02.2-5, assigned address 3
  usb.c: USB device not accepting new address=3 (error=-71)

Does this mean my storage device is not supported? Would someone help me 
interpret this?

Thanks!

Andrew Robinson