Problem with SEAGATE FreeAgent USB disk drive on Linux

After the sucess of two days ago, I started to have problems with the SEAGATE FreeAgent USB disk drive on my Linux system. Apparently SEAGATE do not support the FreeAgent USB disk drive on a Linux system!

The problem seems to be due to the SEAGATE FreeAgent USB disk drive going into power save mode. The symptoms on Linux are I/O errors. Often I could list the directories but not access any files. After investiagation it would appear that the symptoms were caused by the directory listing commands returning data from the Linux cache but as soon as I needed to do real I/O, I got the errors. It seems that the SEAGATE FreeAgent USB disk drive does not come out of power saving mode in a maner that was compatible with my Linux system.

There were a few suggestions on the Internet. Most identified that the SEAGATE FreeAgent USB disk drive had problems after spindown/spinup. Most needed the Linux utility sdparm in order to stop the auto spindown.

But I took a very much simpler approach. I created a CRON job with a very simple command. The CRON entry is

*/10 * * * * date > /backups/p3/stop-spin-down/last.txt

This runs the command every 10 minutes and writes to the FreeAgent USB disk. The disk had a mount point of /backups/p3 and I just made a directory (mkdir /backups/p3/stop-spin-down) - writable by all (chmod go+rwx /backups/p3/stop-spin-down) - for the file to be written to.

I hope that helps other people and I will let you know if I have any other problems.

Installing a SEAGATE FreeAgent USB disk drive on Linux is easy

After my sucess in July 2008 of installing a USB disk drive on Linux I did it again today. This time I needed to partition the USB disk drive.

The steps were:

Plug the USB disk drive onto a Windows XP (home) PC. The USB disk drive was a Seagate FreeAgent Desk external 500GB drive USB 2.0. The PC only had USB 1 ports but it worked fine.

I then copied the files from the disk (about 90MBytes) to my PC.

Then I used the Windows Disk Manager (Settings->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Storage->Disk Management) to partition the disk into 4 partitions. The first was around 90MBytes for the NTFS. The next three were deined in a logical partition. They were set as FAT32 or NTFS - at this point it does not really matter what the file system is as they will be changed in Linux.

I then unpluged the USB cable from the PC and plugged it into a USB port on my Linux machine. Then on the Linux machine:

1. As root (su command)
   
   
   
   1. /sbin/fdisk /dev/sda
      
      
      
      1. p (to show and verify the partions)
         
      2. Changed the three logical partitions (partitions 5, 6 and 7) to have an id of 83 - Linux partition
         
      3. w (to write table to disk and exit)
         
      
      
   2. /sbin/blockdev --rereadpt /dev/sda
      
   3. /sbin/mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda5 (being a 24 GByte partition, this took several minutes)
      
   4. /sbin/mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda6 (being a 3 GByte partition, this took a few minutes)
      
   5. /sbin/mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda7 (being a 355 GBytes disk, this took around 2 1/2 hours)
      
   6. mkdir /backups
      
   7. mkdir /backups/p1
      
   8. mkdir /backups/p2
      
   9. mkdir /backups/p3
      
   10. mount /dev/sda5 /backups/p1
       
   11. mount /dev/sda6 /backups/p2
       
   12. mount /dev/sda7 /backups/p3
       
   
   

It really was as easy as that. Considering that the version of Linux (Red Hat Linux release 7.2 Enigma ) was over 7 years old and it was running on a Pentium processor (not even a Pentium 2), that is very impressive