Having only a 100GB hard disk on my Acer 4070 Travelmate laptop, I made the decision to buy an external hard drive – and chose the a 1.5TB Seagate expansion drive – one that looks like this;

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/expansion/expansion_desktop/

Of course I didn’t check the box or the support documentation before purchasing, but like usual anticipated that I’d be able to get it working under Linux – in my case FC9. Unfortunately in this case every trick in my arsenal has failed. The drive just won’t mount. I admit, my knowledge of Fedora’s mount and fstab functionality is limited, but there is a nagging suspicion that there is a way to make it work!

I’m running a dual boot system – one partition with Windows XP and the other with FC 9.

What I’ve tried so far;

• Booted into Windows XP
• Safely ejected hardware device
• Booted into FC 9
• Ran the mount command and fdisk but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me;

[root@localhost ~]# mount
 /dev/sda3 on / type ext3 (rw)
 proc on /proc type proc (rw)
 sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
 devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
 tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
 none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
 sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
 fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
 gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/KathyReid/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=KathyReid)
 /dev/sda2 on /media/ACER type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,shortname=lower,uid=500)

fdisk -l

[root@localhost media]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
 Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
 Disk identifier: 0xecedeced

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
 /dev/sda1               1         509     4088511   12  Compaq diagnostics
 /dev/sda2             510        6303    46540305    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
 /dev/sda3   *        6304        8853    20482875   83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
 1 heads, 63 sectors/track, 46512336 cylinders
 Units = cylinders of 63 * 512 = 32256 bytes
 Disk identifier: 0x00d7dd1b

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
 /dev/sdb1   *           2    46512256  1465136032+   7  HPFS/NTFS

When trying to access the drive from the the desktop (I’m running Gnome), it keeps giving the following error;

I’m not ready to admit defeat though.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

Being a geek, it is no surprise that my monitor (an Acer X223W) is bigger than my (Teac analogue) television. It therefore made sense that rather than upgrading my TV with a set top box, to investigate what’s on the market to receive HDTV on the computer.

The weapon of choice was a Gadget Geek USB HDTV tuner, purchased from Dick Smith for under $AUD 100. Not bad. Under Windows XP, it installed quickly and easily. The unit came with a mobile antenna and Blaze HD TV software, and on the first scan for channels, it found absolutely, yep you guessed it, nothing. So, out came the coax cable, and I plugged the USB HDTV tuner into the outlet in the wall (straight from the antenna – it was previously hooked into my stereo to receive FM radio). The coax cable only fared slightly better – receiving only the digital SBS channels. Just to be absolutely sure, I repeated the process on the other two coax outlets (yep, small unit and three phone lines and three coax outlets. I <3 my house. It will be even better when it’s CAT 6 wired). At most, I could receive 10% signal strength for one other digital channel.

Not to be deterred, I booted into my other operating system (Fedora Core 9) to see whether MythTV would fare any better. MythTV was a nightmare to install – it is not for Linux newbies. After spending four hours resolving dependencies in yum, I finally got the software to install… only to find that there are no Linux drivers for the USB HDTV tuner. Bummer.

Conclusion: I need a new antenna that can pick up HDTV signals. Well, it beats socks as an Xmas pressie