HOWTO use an External USB Drive on Skynet

You can use external USB drive with Skynet. Here is how to access its data.

Step 1. Don’t Plug in the Drive Yet

Start by running fdisk to list the currently mounted file systems.

% sudo fdisk -l

You will compare this output from fdisk with its output after you plug in the drive.

Step 2. Plug in the Drive

Step 3. Run fdisk Again

Run the fdisk command again.

% sudo fdisk -l

Compare this output from fdisk with prior run’s output. The difference will be your USB drive. It will include lines like

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/xyz    *          64  1220940063   588792704    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

The last line gives you the device name /dev/xyz.

Step 4 (Optional). Reformat the Drive with a Linux Filesystem

If this is a new drive, and you don’t need to access it under Windows, then you can reformat it with a modern Linux filesystem. The command below will reformat your USB drive with the ext3 file system. Use the device name from Step 3 instead of /dev/xyz. Warning: Be sure that you properly identified the device name of your USB drive. This is not the time to guess! An incorrect guess will destroy whatever file system you list for /dev/xyz. If necessary, go over the output from Steps 1 and 3 again to be sure.

% sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/xyz

Step 5. Create a Mount Point

Run these commands to create an empty directory. You will be accessing the USB drive later as /mnt/my_filesystem_name.

% cd /mnt
% sudo mkdir my_filesystem_name

Step 6. Add the New Filesystem to /etc/fstab

Edit /etc/fstab

% sudo vi /etc/fstab

Add a line like this. Use the device name from Step 3 instead of /dev/xyz. Use the Mount Point from Step 4 instead of /mnt/my_filesystem_name/. Also, if you reformatted the drive, use the actual file system type from Step 4 instead of ntfs (such as ext3).

/dev/xyz       /mnt/my_filesystem_name/      ntfs defaults     0       0

Step 7. Mount the Drive

This command will look through /etc/fstab and mount the USB drive.

% sudo mount -a

Step 8. Fix Access Protections

Confirm that the access protections are as desired and fix if necessary.

% cd /mnt
% ls -l
% sudo chmod 755 my_filesystem_name