Attatch external USB Drive

[Ritmo2k]

I have a short window to fetch some data, will this work to run vmkfstools to export a few discs? The filesystem on the drive is NTFS, I doubt ESX has ntfs support so I assuming I need to repartition it...

Thanks!

[avarcher · Accepted solution]

I've not got a system to try this, but I'm sure it is sound.

If you plug the USB device into the ESX server then immediately issue the command 'dmesg' from the Service Console command line, which should output the linux device id given to the USB drive, for example '/dev/sdb'.

Run 'fdisk -l /dev/sdb' to check to see the ntfs partition can be seen by Linux. Replace /dev/sdb with what dmesg gave you.

Create a mountpoint, say 'mkdir /mnt/ntfs'

Then mount the device 'mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/sdb /mnt/ntfs' and access it from '/mnt/ntfs'. Replace /dev/sdb with what dmesg gave you.

When finished 'umount /mnt/ntfs' then remove the device.

[dmanconi]

Hi

You could try the suggestions at this link

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=409

Cheers

David

[Ritmo2k]

I should have left the NTFS fs on it

The fat suggestion didnt work for me...

I used ext3 and yanked a winxp driver for it off the net.

Thanks guys!

[H_Mijail]

Just in case anyone is trying to do as suggested here: you can NOT mount an NTFS partition in ESX 3.5.

The issue seems to be confusing, since there are reports of people doing it in ESX 2. But I have just tried attaching an external USB 2 disk with a single, 500 GB NTFS partition. The disk is recognized, as shown by dmesg and sfdisk -l. But mount fails:

#mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/sdc5 usbPhillips/

mount: fs type ntfs not supported by kernel

Looks like one could download the appropiate userland utilities from linux-ntfs (http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=redhat:rhel3) and hope that the kernel module is in place, but there are warnings of problems if you don't select the exact build corresponding to your kernel, and the uname makes me think there are kernel changes after all. So... I'm chickening out and will do with SMB.

(Check other posts around here talking about NTFS mounting problems in ESX 3)

[wrob0123]

I got my USB 2.0 external hard drive working for backup on ESX 3.5

The drive came preformatted with NTFS filesystem

To get read/write access I used the ntfs-3g and fuse drivers

see ntfs-3g.org and fuse.sourceforge.net for more info

First I had to workaround the ehci driver problem on my HP DL360 hardware

Since I dont need the USB 1.1 support, I just disabled the ohci driver.

This is what my /etc/modules.conf file looks like after modification:

1. cat /etc/modules.conf

alias eth0 tg3

alias eth1 tg3

alias scsi_hostadapter cciss

#alias usb-controller usb-ohci <--- took out 2 lines

#alias usb-controller1 ehci-hcd <--- added next line

alias usb-controller ehci-hcd

see attachment for build instructions

[plosky]

hi

I follow your instructions, but i get stuck:

/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 kernel/fuse.o /lib/modules/2.4.21-47.0.1.ELvmnix/kernel/fs/fuse/fuse.o

/usr/bin/install: cannot stat `kernel/fuse.o': No such file or directory

can you help me?