diy external firewire hard drive linux

By klsh on June 8, 2005 8:56 PM | | TrackBacks (0)

I bought an external firewire enclosure for ide devices for my debian linux laptop. this article chronicles some of the points of installing the drive for backing up my data.

hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

remember just add an old IDE drive to this nifty case for a cheap portable storage option. tons of photos below.


the wonderful box!

Products- PHR-100AF- FireWire400 1394A External Storage Enclosure for 3.5" HDD

ooooh neat, bubble wrap!


these three are very similar.

you can stand it on end.


comes with a slide on stand for vertical orientation.


it slides on very easily.


now that is a nice packing job! the plastic shell provides great support.


you will need a firewire port, i happen to have a pcmcia card that is an ieee.1394 firewire adapter.


mounting rubber bumbers, install them loosely.

set the jumpers for master mode. not slave, or CS.


the bumpers snap into the frame and then you tighten the screws.

plug everything in, boot the computer and make sure you've turned on the power on the back of the drive then you can prep the drive with fdisk and format it under debian linux.

debian:/home/user# fdisk /dev/sda

Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
content won't be recoverable.


The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 30515.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)


Command (m for help): n
Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-30515, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-30515, default 30515):
Using default value 30515

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!


Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.

debian:/home/user# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda1
mke2fs 1.38-WIP (09-May-2005)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
30654464 inodes, 61277926 blocks
3063896 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
1871 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
16384 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872

Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 23 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.


debian:/home/user# mkdir /mnt/data
debian:/home/user# mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/data
debian:/home/user# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 27G 23G 3.2G 88% /
tmpfs 158M 0 158M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 10M 716K 9.4M 7% /dev
/dev/sda1 231G 129M 219G 1% /mnt/data


all done now we have a functioning external drive.
in case you weren't paying attention, if you buy the case you can put a spare20GB or 30GB in there and treat it was a portable backup device.




  • Solid Aluminum body for protection and excellent heat dissipation

  • Shock absorbent rubber strip on top and bottom

  • Supports any capacity 3.5" ATA Hard Drives

  • Works with both Mac and PC computers

  • Supports IEEE 1394A FireWire connection

  • Dual FireWire ports for daisy chain

  • Stackable design

  • Supports hot plug and play

  • Active LED to indicate power and data access

  • AC adapter included

  • Solid Aluminum body for protection and excellent heat dissipation

  • Shock absorbent rubber strip on top and bottom

  • Supports any capacity 3.5" ATA Hard Drives

  • Works with both Mac and PC computers

  • Supports IEEE 1394A FireWire connection

  • Dual FireWire ports for daisy chain

  • Stackable design

  • Supports hot plug and play

  • Active LED to indicate power and data access

  • AC adapter included


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This page contains a single entry by klsh published on June 8, 2005 8:56 PM.

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