External USB Drive

Movin’ On

I have a few external USB drives, and one is my “Library” drive, where I keep music, documentation, and videos. It is a 750G Seagate FreeAgent Pro and previously I had been using it under Windows XP.

Converting

This drive had been acting a little bit strange under Ubuntu. It would work fine, but after a while it would “disappear”, as if it had been un-mounted or something. The drive name would still appear in Nautilus, but no contents.

Now, I don’t know (yet) if it will make a difference, but I wanted to go ahead and change the drive from NTFS to ext3. The main reason, of course, is that I am working towards removing every last trace of Microsoft products and technologies, and there’s just no reason for me to have this drive in a non-Linux format. So…

Formatting

I thought this would be empty, because my plan was to just copy all the data onto my local hard drive (there’s only about 200GB of files right now), do the format, and then copy it all back to the Library drive.

One tool to do this is GParted, and I had used it before re-partitioning my local hard drive. So, I copied the files over, and tried. It took a long time, saying “Scanning all drives…” in the status bar for a long time – I mean minutes. So, I looked about the internets and found a suggested fix to make a BIOS change. Basically, if you do not have a floppy drive, then turn off the floppy drive in the BIOS.

Booty Boot Boot

Now came something that has happend to me a couple of times before: Ubuntu gets caught in a re-boot cycle. That is, the BIOS screen shows, GRUB runs, the Kernel comes alive, screen blanks like it is going to through up the GNOME login, then the BIOS screeen shows, GRUB runs, etc…

I honestly don’t know why this is, and jumping into GRUB and choosing the recovery option has always worked. While I was there, I decided to use GParted and format the USB drive.

GParted

This time, everything started fine, I just selected /dev/sdb1 from the upper right drop-down, told it to re-format to ext3, and went for snack. It took maybe 10 minutes.

From here I got caught in the re-boot loop again, and I finally “broke out” by actually powering off and powering on, rather than pressing the reset button on the box. I think that’s what did the trick last time as well.

What’s in a name

Now, the next thing to do was set the name. There are easy instructions for this, I used:sudo e2label /dev/sdb1 Library

I had to unmount and re-mount the USB drive to see the name change. The easy way to do this was right-click and unmount, and then just cycle power on the USB drive.

You don’t own me!

Next step was to copy the files back over – so, I open up Nautilus and was happy to find that I didn’t have permissions to write to the USB drive! Hooray!

I needed to take ownership of the drive under my normal user name, so I tried a couple of things:

sudo chown -R jason:jason /dev/sdb1
sudo chown -R jason:jason /media/Library

I think it was the second that worked, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure because the changes didn’t seem to reflect in Nautilus right away.

All done!

And that’s that – I opened up Rhythmbox, and the Music library started filling right on up. We will see how it goes from here!

Edited to add:

The ‘dissappearing drive’ problem is still happening: Some of the folders suddenly changed to “unknown file types”. Re-mounting the drive restored everything, but now I’m wondering if there is a problem with the drive. Now, I have to find out how to check a drive for errors…