> Its formated as vfat. When I plug it in, the light on > the drive stays on for about 1 minute and then its > off. Also, I did not get anything from the > /var/log/messages file with the tail -f. When I do a > fdisk -l, it did not show up as well. ??? Charles: Let's see what we have here. Maybe a little more information will help to fix the problem. What kind/size of USB disk are you using? I have a 120GB Maxtor drive and a 160GB Iomega HDD disk and both are happy. Is the disk connected to the computer when the system boots? If so the output of 'dmesg' should show you what device file belongs to the disk. Were you able to determine the device file name, like '/dev/sda1' or '/dev/sdb2', that it is using? When you say that the disk is formatted as vfat, does this mean that you executed the mkfs command? You would have done something like mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1 to do this. I had a problem with the virgin format on my Iomega disk from the factory. Although the partitions were acceptable to Windows, parted reported that partitions were overlapped and the disk was not usable on Linux. I had similar results to yours: the disk would spin up, run for a bit, and then shut down. After using mkfs, I was able to use the disk (I used ext3 instead of vfat to get support for large files). But out of the box, it did not work. The Maxtor disk had no issues once I discovered the proper device file name. Perhaps this will give you some ideas that will help you solve the problem. Remember that running mkfs will take a long time on a large disk (mine took about an hour), and WILL DESTROY DATA on the disk. Erik
