Setting up USB HD

[Karl Larsen]

    I have a 18 GB hard drive in a case with a power supply and a devise 
that couples it to the USB system. When I checked it is mounted at 
/dev/sde1 and I was able with fdisk to put 2 partitions on it that are 
called /dev/sde1p1 and /dev/sde1p2. Here is what fdisk shows:

root at karl-desktop:~# fdisk /dev/sde1

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 59597.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sde1: 30.7 GB, 30758257152 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 59597 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x69205244

     Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sde1p1               1       25000    12599968+  83  Linux
/dev/sde1p2           25001       59597    17436888   83  Linux

Command (m for help):

As you can see it looks just fine. But I find that mkfs can't locate 
/dev/sde1p1 so I can't put a file system on the partitions. Here is what 
mkfs.ext3 says:

root at karl-desktop:~# mkfs.ext3  /dev/sde1p1
mke2fs 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
Could not stat /dev/sde1p1 --- No such file or directory

The device apparently does not exist; did you specify it correctly?

    It must be a problem with the USB connection. I was frankly 
surprised and happy that the fdisk worked properly, or appeared to at 
least. Does anyone have experience that might help?
 

Karl

-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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