firewire (IEEE1394) harddrive: how to use?
Hi all,
This may sound a stupid question, but how are we *supposed*
to use a firewire harddrive? I'm now using one without problems,
so this isn't a usual "howto" question.
The other day I asked our tech person for an internal ATA harddrive.
He didn't have one at the moment, so he gave me a firewire harddrive
instead, saying that it should work with my Debian box because he
used it with his RedHat box. He added that I could erase any of
his files in the drive.
I managed to add necessary modules to my kernel by consulting this
website
http://www.linux1394.org/start_req.php
and I saw that the drive was recognized by the drivers, judging from
the messages in /var/log/messages. But,
# mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt
didn't work. (The error message was to the effect of wrong filesystem.)
I tried "ext2" in place of "vfat" unsuccesfully. Finally, I looked
into the disk by fdisk and found that the partitioning didn't make sense
to me. The partition boundaries didn't allign with cylinder boundaries;
the partition IDs were 53 (Disk Manager 6.0 Aux3), 67 (68 or 69, I forgot
which, but it was Novell), and something which wasn't in the ID list
(http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html).
Hmm. Since the tech guy said I could erase anything and since I was
in a hurry, I erased all the existing partitions, created a fresh one,
and formatted the disk as an ext2 filesystem. That's what I'm now using.
It works perfectly fine. But, since I formatted it as an ext2 filesystem,
it won't work with Windows any longer.
So, I have a feeling that I did something wrong. What was the "right"
way? How do you think the tech guy used the drive? The partition ID
53 (Disk Manager), which I don't know what it is, smells something
related, but . . . Additional questions are, what should one do to
share a firewire drive between Linux and Windows? What about
hotplugging?
Thank you,
Ryo
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