How to access a USB external hard drive in Linux

[haxen]

Hook up your USB drive and boot up Linux. After you are logged in as root, open terminal window and a real nice simple command to see all storage devices available in Linux is:

fdisk -l

(that is the letter l, not a 1)

Be real careful with this command, don't go fdisk your hard drive. The -l will give you a listing of devices and won't reset the file allocation table. An example of my PS3 with a camera with a 1 gig storage card hooked up by USB is:

localhost ~ # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 47.1 GB, 47126736896 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 44943 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 43919 44973040 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 43920 44943 1048576 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 4 MB, 4194304 bytes
1 heads, 8 sectors/track, 1024 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8 * 512 = 4096 bytes

Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/sdf: 1048 MB, 1048481280 bytes
33 heads, 63 sectors/track, 985 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2079 * 512 = 1064448 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdf1 * 1 985 1023874+ 6 FAT16
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(984, 32, 63) logical=(984, 32, 56)

This output tells you what device name Linux assigns to your USB storage device. Look above and you see the sdf disk and in particular the partition for it /dev/sdf1 device showing 1 Gig of memory, that is my digital camera 1 gig storage card connected by USB to PS3. The sda1 and sda2 are the standard partitions for your linux install, the second one being the swap partition which i setup to be 1 gig in my case.

To access this USB drive sdf in my case, you have to "mount" it in Linux. In a terminal window, enter the following commands after you find the device name from the above instructions. My device name is the partition name of sdf1. I will setup a "camera" directory to let me know that anything in this directory is actually in the storage card of my camera when it is hooked up by USB to my PS3.

cd /mnt
mkdir camera
mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/camera/

the /mnt/camera/ can be any logical name like /mnt/USBdrive or /mnt/SATA or whatever, just put the directory in the mnt folder

To access the drive, you just navigate your file manager to /mnt/SATA or whatever you called it. Make new directories and copy files in this structure and away you go.

cd /mnt
mkdir camera
mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/camera/

Do I need to type in mkdir camera as well?

[bladedeye27]

thanks for that!!

i have another problem which you might be able to answer..

ok here's the thing..

I currently use Vista to stream content to my 360. Am going to change that in favour of putting YDL on my PS3 and watching my stuff that is stored on an external HDD.

here is my dilema....

This external HDD of course can be formatted with FAT32 but on Windows (where my files currently are) you only have a max format size of 32GB. The drive is 200GB.

How do I format the drive so that it can be read under linux and formatted the whole 200GB and also copy my files over to it from Windows once done?

Thanks in adv!!

[n111ck]

I don't know how, but I just plugged mine into my PS3's usb port and it worked...I didnt do any of this stuff...

[navysandsquid]

Originally Posted by Bushido

thanks for that!!

i have another problem which you might be able to answer..

ok here's the thing..

I currently use Vista to stream content to my 360. Am going to change that in favour of putting YDL on my PS3 and watching my stuff that is stored on an external HDD.

here is my dilema....

This external HDD of course can be formatted with FAT32 but on Windows (where my files currently are) you only have a max format size of 32GB. The drive is 200GB.

How do I format the drive so that it can be read under linux and formatted the whole 200GB and also copy my files over to it from Windows once done?

Thanks in adv!!

If you have access to a tool like Partition Magic in windows, you can convert a large(!) NTFS formated drive to FAT32. You don't loose any data and it is really quick. I thought I had to back up everything first and then copy it back, but that's not necessary. After doing that, you can access your HDD both when connected to Windows and PS3. There's probably some Linux tool for doing this, but I don't know which...

(It is windows FAT32 formater that sets the low limit on the drive size - not FAT32 itself. That's why this works. Try wikipedia FAT32 if you want to know more.)

[aktizol]

[root@localhost aktizol]# fdisk -l
bash: fdisk: command not found

any ideas?

[kokojmpo1]

thanksssssssssssssssss

[H.axen]

@ aktizol, make sure you are logged in as root

[Walrusbonzo]

Ok, a problem.

I've got a 250GB external HD, I create a primary partition of 32GB and format it with the FAT32 file system. The PS3 wont recognise any files I copy onto it.

Do I need to create folders with certain names or something?

[bigstyle]

i get "unkown file system type 'ntfs' ". this means i need to format it FAT32 correct? i also have tried to convert the external HDD using Partition Magic but all i can do is change from primary to logical. the column for the different filesystems is not highlighted, what does this mean?