Adding an external USB drive

[LEGOManiac]

On my previous server, I had my user's files stored on an external USB drive in NTFS format. Now I figured I could just plug it into the eBox server, create shares and go.

Apparently not. What do I need to do to get ebox to recognize the USB drive? I had expected it to auto-mount in /mnt.

For those of us who aren't particularly command-line savvy, how do I go about doing this?

I know I should probably be using the mount command, along the lines of:

sudo mount usbdev2.1_ep00  /mnt/shares

but there are so many usbdev*** devices that I don't know where to start.

[dragonslayr]

Edited!!  I'm going to leave the below answer, but as I consider this, I think your just going to bork all your files. Move the data to a ext3 file system. Then you can mount it and continue the journey..

Also, your better to mount a fresh drive, then you'll have to move the home partition of the ebox install to that fresh drive, then create users, then drag the data.. This can all be done, and not to terribly difficult.


***************************************************
No automount in a command line install.

sudo fdisk -l
look and see which drive it is.
then
mkdir /mnt/usbdrive
then (change the sdd1 to whatever fdisk -l showed you)
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdd1 /mnt/usbdrive

If all goes well, you can add a line to fstab to mount at boot.

Read here for more info.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount/USB


BTW, would you not have some real problems using samba with ntfs? Sounds like a really bad idea.

[LEGOManiac]

I'm a newbie to most of this, so I don't know if I'd have any problems using samba with ntfs.

The drive in question has a capacity of 1 TB and my Pentium 3 eBox server won't recognize it if I mount it internally. That P3 was my server for many years using Windows 2000 Server but this year I've made it a goal to convert all the windows boxes to linux.

It had been my understanding that Linux handled NTFS quite well. In earlier testing, I had an NTFS drive mounted in another test workstation and was able to use the files on the drive without any problems. I don't see why mounting it as a USB device should change that.

I could, of course, buy another 1TB drive and copy all the files over but this would be time consuming and I was trying to avoid it.


So, my followup question would be:

Is there some known issue with Linux and NTFS? Why do you feel this would be a problem?

[dragonslayr]

I really don't know if it'd work or not. Linux has permissions that may not be compatable. I'm sure it will read/write it, but..  ??  Dunno
I'd never considered the thought. I googled it for a bit, but did not come up with a definitive answer for you.

Also, consider user permissions for your main user. It is also in the /home directory. So now you have that to deal with as well as samba issues that may or may not exist. What will the system do when it tries to do user permissions on your main users home directory.. ??
BTW, it probably wouldn't bork your files.. But I still have big doubts about it. I vote for another drive.. You need one for backup anyway.. 

If you need help mounting the drives or moving /home after, feel free to ask.

[LEGOManiac]

Well, I took the plunge and tried it. No problems so far.

Mind you, I'm not trying to use permissions at this point. There are only two restricted directories which contained system backups but since eBox has been, for the most part,  living up to my expectations, that system is likely never to be used again, it's largely irrelevant.

By the way, when you check the permissions on an NTFS drive, the system reports that "the permissions could not be determined", so obviously, if I do want to restrict user access in some way, I'll have to get another drive and format it with ext3.

Now, does anyone know if the ext3 file system will work with Western Digital's WDTV device?