i know it’s free, and 98% of the time it works exactly the way i want it to (which is significantly more than either mac or windoesn’t), but the other 2% of the time it’s frustrating to the point of distraction… 😐
so a couple weeks ago, i bought a 3tb external (usb) hard disk, and using both the linux GUI and the linux terminal, i was completely unable to do an awful lot more than render the disk unreadable. i’m sure there is a way to partition the disk into two sections, and then “mkfs” them into existence, but i have not been able to figure it out…
so i plugged it into the mac, and it popped up a window that said “this disk is unreadable, what do you want to do about it?”, whereupon i ran the disk utility, formatted and partitioned the disk in about 2 minutes, and went on to something else.
and when i unplugged the disk from the mac and plugged it back into the linux machine, suddenly it was able to read the disk, and it mounted both partitions when i asked it to… but the problem is that now the “owner” of the disks, instead of being “root” is “99” and i can’t change it to anyone else, because /media/home and /media/backup are only the mount points, and the actual device lives at /dev/something-or-another (there are actually 199 “devices” listed in /dev, and only a few of them are actually being used) and all of them are owned by “root”… however, when “root” tries to change the ownership of the mount points, i get an error that indicates it is a “read-only file system”… which isn’t much help…
i can see the disk, i can mount and unmount the disk, i can read the disk, but i can’t write to it? where’s the justice?
grumble, mutter, gripe, moan, complain… *%&#^@*%… (jarns, nittles, grawlix and quimp)
sorry for any confusion, my mentioning of the jumpers was just that we’d tried a bunch of different settings and Linux wouldn’t see it at all (as far as I could tell). all of that was prior to me finding the Disk Utility. it probably would’ve found it with any (or none) of the jumpers set if I’d only known to use the DU, or that it even existed.
I don’t understand why it won’t auto-mount. once I’d formatted mine it just did.
Yeah, I understand that. It’s not exactly the most user-friendly way of doing things, especially since most things are properly designed to be configured and or Plug N’ Play.
But, as with any Linux bit, you look for some help on the Internet, and it at least gives you syntax of what you’re looking at, even if you don’t really know what to change it to later on…
it’s /etc/fstab (file system tab) and i got around it by using Disk Utility to re-format each of the partitions to ext4, taking ownership of the device while doing so.
modifying /etc/fstab, while it may be a dead reliable way of taking care of this kind of problem, is kind of iffy for me, because /etc/fstab contains entries like this:
UUID=a607df9d-9dfc-4f58-9f2e-473d1b14b7d9 /media/disk ext3 users 0 1UUID=054ab818-dd0d-4991-b30a-a96db834262e swap swap sw 0 0
UUID=21868c77-7fcc-457f-ac3f-a8c99f264ca3 /media/disk ext3 defaults 0 0
and i don’t know exactly what to put into it to make it work correctly, and not screw other things up…
Did you check to see how the disk in mounted in /etc/mtab (or is it /etc/fstab)? You might need to change an “ro” to an “rw” to have it mount in a writable manner, especially since you’ve modified it to mount at startup.
Also, I wonder what kind of volume the parted equivalent sees the disk as.
the problem is multi-fold… the drive doesn’t have jumpers that are user-accessible. there might be jumpers inside, if i was willing to crack open the case, but this is brand new, and isn’t meant to have any user-accessible functions that are not accessible from outside the machine… and i don’t want to go voiding my warranty just yet…
i have Disk Utility installed, and it does, indeed, see the drive. it actually saw the drive before it rendered it unreadable, and after that, it continued to see the drive, although it couldn’t do anything about the fact that it was unreadable… which is where mac stepped in…
i’ve now set the disk to auto-mount at boot up, but if i can’t take ownership of the disk, i’ve got a huge electronic hole into which i can’t toss anything… 😐
I had a similar problem trying to get Linux to recognize a 160GB drive in one of those external USB drive bays.
the second time we twiddled with the jumper on the drive and it couldn’t be seen I looked around to see if Ubuntu had any sort of “search for new hardware” thing. bearing in mind that I don’t use the Kubuntu version (so your version may be called something else) I found a thing called Disk Utility on my System/Administration menu. I popped it open and there was the drive, along with a message that it was formatted funky and would I like to fix that. I formatted and partitioned it (right from the Disk Utility thing) and now it’ll auto-mount if it’s turned on when the computer boots or I can boot the computer and later turn the drive bay on at which point it happily auto-mounts that way as well.
you may be able to re-format, etc. from the Disk Utility (or whatever Kubuntu might call it). it’s worth a try.