[Linux-disciples] Mounting a USB hard drive

[Stephen R Laniel]

My landlord has a 160-gig hard drive inside of an enclosure
connected to a USB port. All of its space is as yet
unpartitioned. When he runs fdisk on his Windows box, the
unpartitioned drive connected to the USB port shows up, but
it appears to have only 25 gigs available. We're trying to
figure out where the problem lies -- enclosure, OS, BIOS,
controllers, etc. -- so he asked me whether he could attach
the drive and enclosure to my USB port on my Linux box.

Question (too much prologue, really): which device file will
I mount to mount the drive? Does the drive have to be
partitioned before I can mount it? Do I need to mount it
before I run fdisk, or can I just 1) connect the drive to
the USB port, then 2) run fdisk?

I have hotplug running, and thus far I've only ever accessed
my digital camera through my USB port. It's very easy,
though, and it seems to Just Work. The only part that
doesn't Just Work is that only root seems able to access the
device. I assume there's some easy fix for this, probably
involving the permissions on some device file. I'm not sure
which device file is involved here, though, so I don't know
which permissions to change or which groups to add people
to.

Thanks for any and all help.

Steve

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 ideas regarding the general solution for the relativistic
 force-free equation describing the structure of the pulsar
 magnetosphere, but he was busy smearing a plastic doll
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