External Hard Disks |
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The 20GB hard disk inside the Acer isn't quite big enough for me, and doesn't really allow for any redundancy. I bought an external case for a HDD. This connects to the laptop through the IEEE1394 (firewire) port. I put an existing 60GB (ATA) disk into this.
In order to use the SBP2 device (the hard disk), we need to insert some modules into
the kernel. I did this by editing the /etc/modules
file. I added the
following lines:
ieee1394
The details of what this does can be found in the .c file for the sbp2 driver.
ohci1394
scsi_mod
sbp2
The SBP2 device is a scsi device. In the external case it is an ATA drive but
the driver talks to it through scsi. Hence my two paritions on the external
disk are known as /dev/sda1
and /dev/sda2
respectively.
In order to allow these to be mounted easily, I added the following two lines
to the /etc/fstab
file:
/dev/sda1 /external1 vfat rw,noexec,user,noauto,nodev,async,umask=000,quiet 0
I also created the directories
/dev/sda2 /external2 vfat rw,noexec,user,noauto,nodev,async,umask=000,quiet 0
external1
and external2
.