I’ve got a 20GB 9mm hard drive that I stuck in an external USB 2.0 enclosure after I upgraded my notebook.
It was formerly formatted as two Reiser partitions, but I’d like to be able to cart around files to Windows machines, so I decided to fdisk and start over in FAT 32.
The partitioning went fine, and so did the formatting (or so I thought):
$ mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sda
No problem, right?
My Suse box sees it fine. I can transfer to and fro with no problems.
Not having a Windows box at home, I wasn’t able to test it until yesterday, when I brought it to class with me to download some ISOs on the fat University pipe.
Plug the drive in to the USB port… check.
Windows installs the USB to IDE drivers… check.
Plug & Play icon shows up in the system tray… check.
Icon for the drive shows up in My Computer… Houston, we have a problem.
The school network is set up in such a way that we lusers have essentially no administrative rights to whatever particular box we happen to be on; it gets reimaged whenever we log in, so I can’t even look at the device manager to see if it’s showing up.
Anybody have any idea what gives? I tried plugging in my little USB flash drive, and it showed up fine. I can’t figure out whether it’s a function of my not having enough admin rights to the machine, or whether my Commie OS version of a FAT 32 filesystem is up to the task. I tried every permutation of logging back in and rebooting I could think of.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.