[Leaplist] USB hard drive enclosure adventure

[Steve Litt]

Hi all,

I needed a big drive for backup, so I bought a Hitachi 2.5", 7200rpm, 500GB 
SATA drive and a USB drive enclosure. I went 2.5 and an enclosure instead of 
one of those external drives because none of the external drives has a 
specification saying whether it's 2.5, and after Bryan's and others 
explanation of ruggedness, I decided to go 2.5.


So I connected the hard drive into the enclosure, put on the cover, inserted 
the USB cable into the enclosure, and finally inserted the other end of the 
USB cable into the computer. Nothing happened. I went into nautilus "my 
computer" and pressed reload -- still nothing. This computer recognizes USB 
digital cameras and camcorders. I tried it in my notebook computer -- same 
result, nothing.

The green light on the enclosure goes on, and if I put the enclosure to my ear 
I can hear it spinning.

Had I missed a step? How do I troubleshoot this thing? The instructions have 
this interesting warning:

==================================================
For new hard drives, you will need to initialize and partition your hard
drive before it will appear in Windows Explorer or on your Mac desktop. Please
refer to your hard drive manufacturer’s documentation or read the “Creating a
New Partition” section of this manual.
==================================================

I'm a Ubuntu (9.10) guy now, so I looked for some GUI way to do the equivalent 
of their "Creating a New Partition" procedure. I found Palimpsest Disk 
Utility, available at System->Administration->Disk_utility. In the disk 
utility I refreshed and sure enough, I saw my Hitachi 500Gb drive. From there 
I created a 100GB partition (ext4), after which I was able to back up to it.

Thanks all.

SteveT
 
Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt


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