# 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?