[lug] Linux FileServer Problems

[Pedersen, Michael J]

I've gotten to play with some of the things you mentioned.  All in all, this
is NOT a fun setup to fix, from my experience.  However, I'll try and give
you some of my notes/ideas about it.

> There's a few things I didn't tell you :) This drive was originally 
> installed into a machine that didn't have a translating BIOS, so it 
> originally had ON-TRACK. The machine it's going into now 
> definitely has LBA 
> so I told it to use LBA. I could try turning that off, and 
> seeing if it 
> finds the software LBA fix on the HDD. But I thought that I'd 
> used this 
> once in a machine that *did* have LBA and I was pretty sure 
> I'd wiped that 
> thing off the drive.

Well, wiping that program off the drive will be ever so much fun if it does
what EZ Drive (Conner/Seagate's solution) did.  I had to do an fdisk /mbr.
Alternately, you need to find a utility which will trash that mbr entirely.
Another possibility is a virus, though I don't suspect that.  My suspicion
is the master/slave position you mentioned later on.  Swap that, so that the
hard drive is master.  You want this anyway, as having it slave will slow
down your system noticeably.

What utility did you use to repartition the drive?  Disk Druid, or fdisk?

> >Michael> Now, I want to have SAMBA share the 2 Windows HDD's with 5
> >Michael> total partitions, but without reformatting or any of that
> >Michael> jive. So I plug in the IDE cable and fire it up. I say
> >
> >Michael> mkdir /mnt/cdrive chmod 777 /mnt/cdrive mount /dev/hdc1
> >Michael> /mnt/cdrive
> >
> >Michael> but it's mounted read-only. I've tried a lot of 
> mount options
> >Michael> to see if I can make it rw, or even accessible to a group
> >Michael> other than root, but it won't let me. So I've got SAMBA
> >Michael> sharing these puppies read-only but not read-write. I'd like
> >Michael> to put script in rc.local so that the shares are mounted at
> >Michael> boot time, read-write to everyone on the network. (It's
> >Michael> firewalled). Suggestions?

Now for my big question about it: Is the drive not read-write for users, or
for root? I had the same problem for a very long time, until I figured out
enough of /etc/fstab to fix it.  Try this line in /etc/fstab (substituting
your partition names):

/dev/hdc1 /mount/point vfat mode=777 0 0

Now, the mode=777 is the important part.  Make sure that you want everybody
to be able to read/write to that drive.  If not, adjust it according.  777
is the permissions for all the files on that drive.  Unfortunately, it has
to be for all of them, since you're keeping those files on windows
partitions.

After that line is in, do these two commands:
umount /moint/point
mount /moint/point
And you should be in business.

Let me know how it goes.