Mass Storage

Disk

The disk is 40 GB and was shipped from the factory with two partitions: a 40 MB partition with ``diagnostic tools'' on it (looks like a bootable DOS system with a few programs and information about the hardware) and the rest of the disk a huge NTFS partition containing Windows XP. Since I don't have Partition Magic and fips is afraid of NTFS, I had to wipe my WinXP installation to repartition the disk. Since I did this the day I got the computer there was no harm in erasing everything.

If you're contemplating not doing so, save the diagnostic partition! See the section about my hardware problems .

Interestingly the disks are in reverse order: the CDROM is connected as /dev/hda and the hard disk and /dev/hdc. The installer caught this for me.

Table: My disk partitioning scheme. /dev/hdc10 is a 2 GB swap partition.

Filesystem	Size	Used	Avail	Use%	Mounted On
/dev/hdc5	91M	41M	45M	47%	/
/dev/hdc6	91M	4.1M	82M	5%	/tmp
/dev/hdc7	2.8G	276M	2.3G	11%	/var
/dev/hdc8	4.6G	1.3G	3.0G	30%	/usr
/dev/hdc9	9.0G	3.6G	4.9G	42%	/home
/dev/hdc2	19G	9.5G	9.0G	52%	/winxp
/dev/hdc1	39M	5.7M	33M	15%	/mnt/tmp

CD Writer

I can write CDs, so the CD writer works as well as the reader. I haven't tried to read a DVD yet but I can't imagine that it would cause problems. The drive is identified as a MATSHITA CD-RW/DVD-ROM UJDA740.

To write CDs requires the modules ide-scsi and scsi_mod to be loaded. If you are using ide-scsi remember that your CD drive is no longer accessible as /dev/hda; you probably want /dev/sr0. Just change your /dev/cdrom symlink and forget about it.

External USB Floppy Drive

The external floppy (by TEAC) worked as soon as USB did. As soon as I plug it into the machine it appears in /proc/bus/usb/devices and tries to see if there's a disk in the drive. It uses the usb-storage driver to access the SCSI layer; the disk mounts from /dev/sda.