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Can't install USB drives, Fdisk not working

Posted: Wed Sep 10, 2014 6:07 pm
by richard1955
Hi all

Firstly i must admit i'm a newbie to the Raspberry Pi but have been in the electronics trade since leaving school in 1970, having been through computers from the old spectrum, Atari ST and the PC.

My reason for getting a Model B+ was to have it perform as a small torrent server for my personal use. I've been using these articles:
http://www.howtogeek.com/138281/the-htg ... erry-pi/2/
http://www.howtogeek.com/139433/how-to- ... ge-device/
http://www.howtogeek.com/142044/how-to- ... rrent-box/

Everything was going fine, i can remotely access the Pi via my PC, etc but i came to a grinding halt when i tried to add a HDD as a USB device. Before i start i have tried 3 different HDD's, one runs on an external PSU and i've installed the drivers for NFTS.

The stop point was the fact that running Fdisk using 'fdisk -1' gives me the error that it is an unrecognised command, it doesn't even see the mico-card.. Nothing i can do gets the unit to recognise anything.

One point, i know the USB ports are working because the keyboard/mouse works fine.

Please, does anyone have any clues as to what's going on

Richard

Re: Can't install USB drives, Fdisk not working

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 10:26 am
by Aydan
richard1955 wrote:The stop point was the fact that running Fdisk using 'fdisk -1' gives me the error that it is an unrecognised command, it doesn't even see the mico-card.. Nothing i can do gets the unit to recognise anything.
That is supposed to be "fdisk -l /dev/sdx" where sdx is your actual device name (sda, sdb, ...) and has to be run as root (or with sudo prepended).
You also need to find out the "name" of your device. Easiest way to do this is to run "tail -f /var/log/messages" befor the drive is connected and then plug in your drive.
One of the messages will tell you which device name your drive got (sda, sdb and so on).

Regards
Aydan

Re: Can't install USB drives, Fdisk not working

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 10:29 am
by skykinetic
Another thing I observe with fdisk is that sometimes it doesn't run properly without root, so it would be good to try running with
sudo fdisk -l

Hope that I did help in a way :)

Re: Can't install USB drives, Fdisk not working

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 10:34 am
by RaTTuS
sudo fdisk -l
it is a minus ell not minus one

Re: Can't install USB drives, Fdisk not working

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 2:47 pm
by richard1955
Right, thanks for the help, i will certainly try it out and get back to you. It's interest that the 'L' is actually written as a '1' nearly everywhere, again thanks for pointing it out.

Richard

Re: Can't install USB drives, Fdisk not working

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 2:54 pm
by RaTTuS
richard1955 wrote:Right, thanks for the help, i will certainly try it out and get back to you. It's interest that the 'L' is actually written as a '1' nearly everywhere, again thanks for pointing it out.

Richard
also it is lower case l and not L

if it looks like a 1 then it's a font / eyes problem

Re: Can't install USB drives, Fdisk not working

Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2014 8:11 am
by richard1955
Well, the Pi is working fine, many thanks for all the help.