Subject: More USB drive considerations
To: NetBSD - Users <netbsd-users@netbsd.org>
From: Brian Rose <lists@brianrose.net>
List: netbsd-users
Date: 12/16/2003 00:02:22
I have my usb hard drive up and running under NetBSD. There seems to be a problem now when I take this to Windows XP. I have a feeling that there is some small thing that I am doing incorrectly.

Once I rebooted, I was able to do a disklabel on "sd0". I added a partition sd0a using disklabel to mark the entire disk as msdos. After the partition was added, I used "newfs_msdos /dev/rsd0a" to create a filesystem. I was then able to mount and interact with the disk normally under NetBSD.

When I unmounted and moved the drive to a WindowsXP machine. After powring on, WindowsXP recognizes the hardware and reports the disk as "Unallocated" in the Computer Management tool. I assume that this is because the MBR is not written to. Indeed, when I move the drive back to the NetBSD machine and do a "fdisk sd0", I see that all the partitions are marked as "<UNUSED>".

What is the correct procedure for adding a disk to NetBSD that will be useable under WindowsXP? I have been cobbling together information from various sources, but I guess I'm missing something.

Thanks in advance

--
Brian