Quote:
A)
- fdisk -l to see what your main hard drive is. It'll almost certainly be /dev/sda but it's good to be sure! (Ignore sda1, sda2, etc -- those are partitions. We want the whole disk.)
- chmod 400 /dev/sda* Prevent yourself from writing to your company drive and any partitions on it. Just insurance. The setting doesn't exist outside of the livecd's tiny mind, so it'll forget this next reboot.
- Plug in your Buffalo disk with USB, wait 15 seconds, then fdisk -l again. It will probably show up as /dev/sdb. Press enter to get a prompt back if kernel debug messages print garbage over it.
.
I have a problem that may not be fixable this evening. I can't, not for lack of trying for hours, find a male to male USB cable in the office. Can the connection be made with an ethernet cable? The Buffalo HD has that port. If I have to wait to purchase a M to M USB cable tomorrow, so be it, but I would prefer to tackle this tonight.
Would I have to mount the HD first as you mentioned in Option B?
---------- Post updated 03-31-11 at 09:41 AM ---------- Previous update was 03-30-11 at 08:14 PM ----------
I just attempted to post this and it didn't seem to post correctly, so I apologize if this reposts.
I have done some reading about USB and my Buffalo HD and it seems that a USB connection won't work for two reasons. The first, the Buffalo HD USB is designed
only to accept additional peripheral storage devices, not to connect the HD as a peripheral to a computer. (That wasn't exactly made clear in the product description; they mentioned that was an option, not the only use...) Two, USB A to USB A wouldn't support data transfer anyway and might short both the peripheral and the computer. Is that correct? I may have been searching using the wrong terms but I was amazed how little information I could find regarding male to male USB cables.
So at this point I have two options from what I can tell:
1) Return the Buffalo HD and purchase another HD that has proper USB connectivity.
2) Connect the Buffalo HD to the linux server using the available Linux ports. I tentatively attempted this last evening, but the gentoo liveCD bootup could never recognize the Buffalo HD using the
fdisk -l; so I aborted the backup attempt. I looked online and in my Linux reference book to find code that would recognize the HD, but I wasn't able to find anything that proved useful. Theoretically, the data backup through the ethernet cable should be faster if I can get it to work properly, right? The linux machine has three ethernet/Lan ports: the first is in a drive bay and is used to connect to the network; the second is in a drive bay above the first and is unused, has no visible symbol and I don't know if it is operational or not; the third is clustered with the other standard ports and has the LAN symbol next to it.
Thanks