Solaris

Solaris doesn't support NTFS, USB hard drives must use a supported file system like PCFS (fat32) to be mountable. There used to be ntfs3g/fuse packages for OpenSolaris but they won't work with Solaris 9, perhaps even less on SPARC hardware as the ntfs3g code might be x86 only.

I want to thank everyone for their suggestions. After formatting the drive as FAT32, I'm still unable to use this drive on the Solaris server. Maybe it's the disk itself. I'm thinking of trying a drive that is less that 1TB. Anyway, not quite ready to throw in the towel just yet, but wanted to thank you for the idea's presented.

T

Is it hardware issue or is it software?

I would suggest:

Try a different USB port on the Solaris box. Remember to run rmformat to find out the new device node.

Running format in expert mode, select the drive followed by the analyse menu. This provides destructive (write & read) and non-destructive testing of the device. See if you can run that without error. To run the whole thing will take hours and hours however.

This is (presumably) a powered USB device (disk drives usually are) so I wouldn't expect USB power issues, however, just to be sure try a powered USB hub between the USB disk and the Solaris box.

I don't think the drive capacity should be an issue but how about trying a simple USB memory stick to see if that works. That would verify the O/S, USB port, etc.

Make sure that volume management is not running when trying all this lot.

Try to fdisk a USB stick, and if that works, then plug in the disk drive and try again. That should prove if drive capacity is an issue.

This USB disk is a plain drive, yes? Without a pseudo built-in CD drive, backup software or any such crap?

Most of the above is to test hardware but I could go on and on with other ideas. Famous last words, it shouldn't be this difficult.

Hope that helps. I'll await your results.

Yes, don't underestimate the disk size factor.

Solaris 9 is really old, released 15 years ago. At that time the internal disks size was probably less than 100 GB, and I believe the maximum partition size for UFS was still 1TB so I wouldn't bet for pcfs support for such an incredibly large disk by Solaris 9 standard.

Moreover, your USB ports are likely USB 1.1 so even if you manage to access your disk, the bandwidth would be painfully slow.