TotalPenguin - More Linux than Kernel 2.6

This is a general guide and should work on any Linux distribution - not just SuSe.

 Step 1

• Boot into SuSe.  Load a terminal session.
  

Step 2

• Power on your Maxtor OneTouch and plug in the USB into the back of your computer.  Your computer should recognize your new External Hard Drive and might become a little sluggish as it loads the "Auto Mount Window" in SuSe.

 Step 3

• type "dmesg | grep Maxtor" and you should see:

If you see this message then SuSe has recognized your Maxtor HD! If you don't see anything at all just run "dmesg" and browse through the entire list for your Maxtor Hard Drive.

Step 4

• Type "dmesg | tail" in order to get more information about the Maxtor Hard drive.  What we are looking for is where the device is located, in this case /dev/sdh1

            Notice the seventh line from the top which states "sdh: sdh1" - this is the location of your drive.

Step 5

• Once you have found the location of your disk type "fdisk /dev/sdh" replacing /dev/sdh with the location found in the previous step.  

Step 6

• Press "p" and enter to display a list of partitions.  You may see a warning that this does not look like a partition table.  Ignore it.  If you look over the list you will notice 4 partitions with "unknown" types and one Novell type.  

Step 7

• Press "d" and enter.  Enter 1.  Repeat this step incrementing the number from 1 to 2, 3 and then 4.  This will delete your partitions from the Maxtor OneTouch hard drive.   

Step 8

• Once the drive is empty press "p" again to view the empty partition table.  You should see nothing there.  Press "n" and enter to create a new primary partition.  Select the default sizes so that the partition takes the entire disk.  The default type will be (83) Linux Partition.  Press "w" and enter which writes the new partition data to the drive. 

Step 9

• Unplug the Maxtor (or simply turn it off) and reboot your computer.  Once the computer has booted up again turn your Maxtor OneTouch back on or plug in a the USB cable again.  Do a "dmesg | tail" again and verify where you drive location is.  It seems every time I reconnect the drive I have a different location.  

Step 10

• Once you have the location of the drive run, as root:  "mkfs -t ext2 -j /dev/sdh1" and replace /dev/sdh1 with your drive location again.  This command will format the hard drive with the ext2 file system type.  This step may take a bit of time to complete.

Step 11

•  Now the hard drive is formatted and Linux can now mount the volume.  To mount first create a directory such as /media/maxtor with the command: "mkdir /media/maxtor" and then mount the volume with "mount /dev/sdh1 /media/maxtor".

• It may take a moment for the mount to complete.

Step 12

• You can now use your new hard drive by browsing to /media/maxtor.  If you want to make this auto mount on boot  add this line to the bottom of your /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdh1       /media/maxtor     ext2    rw,noauto,user   1, 0 

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