Re: detecting hdd on usb cable

[Scott Gifford <sgifford@suspectclass.com>]

Andrew Henry <adhenry@bredband.net> writes:

> I have connected a laptop hdd to another laptop using a usb to ata
> converter cable.  The laptop has an sata drive and the internal drive i
> have hanging off the usb cable is ata, and "fdisk -l" does not recognise
> the device at all, but WinXP does see it OK when I boot into Windows.

Look in the logs when you plug it in and run lsusb to look for clues.

> Does the USB to ATA converter cable need a kernel driver or is there
> perhaps an issue with seeing ATA drives when the inbuilt is SATA?

I would expect it to present the drive as a USB Storage device, in
which case you would only need the USB storage driver (and the USB
drivers it uses).  But the manufacturer could have done anything with
the device, so anything is possible.

Sometimes I have had to hack around a bit because the USB drivers
don't recognize the particular vendor ID or device ID.  If that's the
case, you could look at hacking the USB storage driver to add in your
device.

Hope this helps,

----Scott.