Seagate 500GB eSATA and Slackware 11.0

MagnumIP · Post by **MagnumIP** » Tue May 01, 2007 6:51 pm

I am trying to get this external SATA hard drive to work in Slackware 11.0. Slackware sees the promise sata card that comes with the HD. I just need to figure out how to get Slack to see the HD so i can format it to use. I'm not sure how to go about it. I tried looking for it using KDE and Konqueror but it does not show up in the /media: area. Thanks for any help

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Tue May 01, 2007 7:15 pm

It should be formatted as FAT32 by default. What does "dmesg" say when you plug the drive in? Linux sees SATA drives as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc.

MagnumIP · Post by **MagnumIP** » Wed May 02, 2007 9:25 am

I forgot what command it was to have Linux see the HD for use. With the help of the binrev forums, I was able to remember the command to use to "mount" the drive. I can't believe I forgot that one. Ubuntu is makes things easy for you but when you go back to a "do-it-yourself" Distro, you tend to be at a loss. Thanks

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Wed May 02, 2007 10:28 am

MagnumIP wrote:I forgot what command it was to have Linux see the HD for use. With the help of the binrev forums, I was able to remember the command to use to "mount" the drive. I can't believe I forgot that one. Ubuntu is makes things easy for you but when you go back to a "do-it-yourself" Distro, you tend to be at a loss. Thanks

Yes, Ubuntu often works if you are using KDE or Gnome because they have special automounting programs built into those desktops. However, when you use Ubuntu without a Desktop Environment and use a lightweight window manager like ion or fluxbox, it is back to editing the fstab file and using mount or pmount with udev rules.

Still being new to Linux, I often don't realize how many simple things those Desktop Environments do for me automaticly until I need to drop down to a slower computer that can't handle loading one of those Desktop Environments. Slackware, does help with that. You just expect that you will have to configure something by hand in a text config file if you want to do something new with your Linux box. I suppose that is why Slackware is often recommended if you really want to learn Linux. You can take the knowledge and apply it to any Linux box you have running with a GUI or CLI only, a server, or a desktop, or a low resource machine.