Maxtor Mini External Hard Drive

[Dan Farrell]

On Sat, 12 Apr 2008 11:25:50 +1000
Tony Corbett <corbtr at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> Tried "dmesg" and there is plenty of ref to the usb maxtor 
> so i guess its sorta being detected any further thoughts ?
> Cheers
> Tony
> 
USB drives (hard drives or SD/MMC/etc. through converter, flash
drives, etc) correspond to a device file /dev/sd[a-z] (in regex
-regular expression- syntax, that means any lowercase letter from a to
z).  Their partitions will be found as device files of the same, but 
numbered from 1. So any drive the linux kernel 'sees' will have device
files:
 /dev/sd[a-z]
 /dev/sd[a-z][0-9]+ created for it (and numbers higher, no doubt)

I find myself doing this kind of thing manually quite often,
and so usually use the bash tab-completion feature to 'scan'
for new /dev/sd[...] devices.  

fdisk can tell us whether a drive is partitioned (and
whether it is seen at all, for that matter):	
   $ sudo fdisk -l
to get an example, why not try that command now?  If your maxtor is
there, you'll be able to identify it in the list by size.  The
partitions will also be listed along with their sizes and types.  A
very nice tool.

You'll probably need to format the drive.  You might consider xfs or
reiserfs if your system supports it; these filesystems are faster than
ext3.  Ubuntueers should be more into them.