Using an USB External Drive with Fedora 6

[Cyberian75]

Hello;

I'm using VMware Player and Fedora Core 6 as a guest OS on a laptop (sda1 & 2) running Windows XP Pro SP2. And I'm trying to use a 500GB external drive to backup a server running FC6 as well.

While Windows can see the drive just fine, Fedora does not. Thus, I can't even format the drive using "mkfs.ext3".

I'd just run the FC6 image from the external drive, which would be a simple solution, but I'd need to access the backup files without running the Player.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Mike

[GBromage]

Could you provide more details?

Are you:

1) trying to connect the USB drive using VMWare shared folders, and make the file system on the USB disk visible through a SMB file share; or

2) attaching the USB connection into the VM, so that Fedora sees the drive as a USB disk; or

3) Create a VMDK file on the USB drive, and run that as part of the VM?

[Cyberian75]

#2. Fedora doesn't see the external drive at all.

[Cyberian75]

I formatted my external drive using PartitionMagic to ext3 and explore2fs can see it. However, VM seems to just ignore it.

df shows sda1 as boot and tmpfs. fdisk shows sda1 and sda2, but it won't let me mount sda2, which I'm not even sure what it is..

Please help.

[GBromage]

When the virtual machine is running, can you click on VM -> Removable Devices -> USB and see if it's listed (or can be connected) through there?

What happens if you disconnect the USB drive, start up the virtual machine, use it (and be working inside it), and THEN plug in the USB drive?

[Cyberian75]

That and FC7 fixed it.

Thanks!

[GBromage]

Glad to hear it.

I see you marked the question as answered. If you wouldn't mind, could you also mark which answer was the correct / helpful one?

Doing so will help other users searching for answers know what to try and will also award me points for answering the question.

Thanks,

Greg

[Cyberian75]

Sure!