Re: Not so "Free Agent" USB drive

[Rick Cochran <]

Anthony Jawad wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 09:45:49AM -0500, Rick Cochran wrote:
> > Now I have the problem that if I create a filesystem on the USB drive 
> > (which shows up as /dev/sda), unmount it, and power cycle the drive, the 
> > drive then shows up as /dev/sdb and the OS will not mount it:
> >
> > samuel> sudo mount /mnt/usb500/
> > mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/USB500/usb500,
> >        or too many mounted file systems
> > samuel>
> >
> > It is trying to access /dev/sda.
> >
> > Is there some special procedure for handling USB drives with Linux?
>
> I think that the way to go is to mount your filesystems using their
> UUID, and not the fickle /dev/sd* identifiers that the OS will give
> them.
>
> The program blkid will help you compute a partition's UUID, and then you
> can use that to create an entry for your drive in /etc/fstab.
>
> HTH,

Anthony,

Thanks for the tip!

I played with blkid, but I was unable to obtain a useful UUID for this partition.

I solved my problem by using fdisk and mkfs to create a simple filesystem 
instead of using the LVM facilities.

Now when I unmount and power cycle the drive, it comes back as /dev/sda instead 
of switching to /dev/sdb.

The Linux instructions for turning off power save mode on the Free Agent drive 
worked.  However, I would not recommend this drive for Linux users since a 
working power save mode is a desirable feature.

Seagate has not treated the Linux community well in this case.

-Rick