So, today was the day when I hooked up my home-made (heh) external drive to my Linksys NSLU2. Once again, since is Part 2 of “doing it the hard way”, I had some problems. Part 1 is here.
First, the cord for the power adapter for the external drive enclosure was too short. So I tried using a universal adapter. OK, let me tell you … just because the adapter can supply the correct VOLTAGE does not mean it will work. If it doesn’t supply the correct CURRENT (in this case, 1.7 amps vs. the 700 milliamps I was getting from the universal), it won’t work. The drive would turn on, but it was not recognized by either the NSLU2 or a direct connection to the PC.
Extension cord time. Used the original adapter with an extension cord. That solved that. I attached the drive to Port 2 (a website said port 2 would recognize NTFS if you have the 2.3r63 firmware). Nope. Didn’t recognize it. Looking at the NSLU2 through the web interface … it didn’t see the drive as formatted.
Looked at the web again. Ah, it’s port ONE! Tried that. Worked fine. Now I tried to add users. Error message: can’t control users without the drive being formatted as EXT3 (Linux). Big sigh.
All right, at least let’s try copying files. Copied one small file. Fine! Copied a large directory FULL of files. Nope. “IO Device Error.” Tried ONE LARGE FILE. “IO Device Error.”
I decided to give up on NTFS and try EXT3. Formatted the external drive through the web interface. 20 minutes later (or so), it was good to go. And it worked!
Except …
The EXT3 file system does not like the “trademark” symbol. It also does not like the “registered” symbol. A few of my files had those symbols in the filenames. So I had to rename them.
My big issue with EXT3, BTW, is that now I can’t take the external HD and hook it up directly to a PC. If the NSLU2 ever fails, I have a 300GB brick in my office … at least until I reformat it and put data on it again … or buy another NSLU2.
Three hours later (yes, 3, because I had to set up all my PCs to synchronize files between themselves and the network drive. I used to synchronize to my “best” PC, but that meant it had to be on all the time, which was a pain), I was done. And despite the fact that I didn’t want to use EXT3 at the beginning, since I could add user control now, it was probably the right way to go.
Lesson learned: don’t trust what you read on the web.
Lesson learned: make sure you check current as well as voltage (it’s the current!)
Lesson learned: try not to use weird symbols in your filenames
