External USB drive PITA...

[MkIII_Supra]

I have two external USB drives, one 3.5" and the other a 2.5" and I can't get either of them to mount or even be recognized on either OpenSuSE 10.3 B2 OR PCLinuxOS 1.0.

The 3.5" drive is in a brand new enclosure and has an old Linux drive in it, formatted to ReiserFS 3.6.

The 2.5" drive is an extra 80GB laptop drive formatted to NTFS. I should still be able to at least read both of these drives from a Linux system and yet... NADA.

I am not sure what to do or how to do it. I have been reading different things around the web but nothing seems to have answered my query. Other thing is

/dev/sda = Main 80GB SATA drive
/dev/sdb = Secondary 160GB SATA drive
/dev/sdc = memory card reader on my HP printer

Attached is a dmesg and lusb dump.

Thank you!

[saikee]

From a user point of view I never had a problem.

I just plug one in, goto the terminal and type
fdisk -l
The disk is expected to come up instantly or after a few attempts (using the direction key to repeat the last command).

If it doesn't showed up then I would investigate the electrical connection. Never had one not detected. The kernel, especially the current version, is supposed to scan the port regularly. Even a brand new disk without a partition and hence cannot be mounted would still shows up.

If the USB disk doesn't show then I would try it on a Windows machine (or boot up Windows) to get a second opinion.

[JRefL5]

Could this be part of the problem?
"loop: loaded (max 8 devices)"
How about disconnecting the HP printer for a test then try accessing the Drives?

[MkIII_Supra]

I finally got the durn things to work... the 2.5" was NTFS and just not cooperating at all, so I did a little fdisk magic (as recommended) and formatted it with FAT32 (I need Windows to be able to read the drive...) so I was able to finally move files off of the Windows XP box I am repairing and I am happy.

The 3.5" disk I ended up having to mount in the case and use a live CD to get the data off of the drive. It was an old 160GB drive that I used to use as my swap and /home drive, before I moved from IDE to SATA drives. Well there were several files on that drive I needed so I couldn't take a change on erasing them. Enter Live CD and all files that are important as now safe elsewhere, so I formatted it FAT32 as well. Although eventually I will reformat as ReiserFS.

Thank for the help!