A couple days ago, someone asked about Linux and Western Digital external
hard drives. This is a response, sort of. I am posting my notes on how I got
a Seagate Free Agent drive to work with Linux. I hope this will help with
other drives. I make no guarantees.


We purchased a Seagate FreeAgent USB drive. Unfortunately, Seagate only
supports it with Windows and Macs. It worked find with Windows XP. On the
Linux box, that was a different story.

Research indicated that the drive was already formatted into NTFS. I knew
this would not be an issue as people mount NTFS partitions all the time on
Linux.

I went to the site www.linux-ntfs.org. I found just about all I needed on
that site. I found this page especially helpful:
www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsmount. It had some good instructions:

First of all you need to download FUSE from Sourcefourge. Then: 

tar zxvf fuse-2.7.0.tar.gz
cd fuse-2.7.0
./configure
Make
make install

Then you need to install ntfsprogs: 

tar zxvf ntfsprogs-2.0.0.tar.gz
cd ntfsprogs-2.0.0
./configure --enable-fuse-module
Make
make install

This installed the ntfsmount command, which I did not have before. But I
wasn't quite finished.

Apparently the issue with this drive has to do with power management. I ran
the command hdparm -Z to "disable Seagate auto-powersaving mode." After
that, I simply ran the command:

ntfsmount /dev/sda1 /media/FreeAgent_Drive

Then, I was ready to go. I could get to the hard drive through the GUI or
the command line.
 

Chris Baker -- cbaker AT intera DOT com
systems administrator
Intera Inc. -- 512-425-2006



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