Mounting an external USB drive

Answer

The following is the procedure for mounting an external USB drive to the NPS host.

1.  Plug in the new drive(s) to the host.
2.  Review the dmesg file on the host.  You should see something similar to the following:
hub.c: USB new device connect on bus2/3, assigned device number 2 usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x1058/0x1110) is not claimed by any active driver.
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: WD Model: My Book 1110 Rev: 1028
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 06
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 1952151552 512-byte hdwr sectors (999502 MB)
sda: sda1 
WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured
USB Mass Storage device found at 2
USB Mass Storage support registered.
hub.c: USB new device connect on bus2/1, assigned device number 3
scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: WD Model: My Book 1110 Rev: 1028
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 06
ttached scsi disk sdb at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 SCSI device sdb: 1952151552 512-byte hdwr sectors (999502 MB)
sdb: sdb1 


This dmesg file shows that two USB devices were added.  They are both 1 TB My Book external hard drives made by Western Digital.  The first is mounted to sda1 and the second is mounted to sdb1.

3. To mount these drives, run the following commands to create a mount directory for each drive:  
mkdir /mnt/usb_storage1
mkdir /mnt/usb_storage2

4. As root, run the following mount commands:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb_storage1
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb_storage2

As long as the drives are formatted in a way that linux recognizes, the drives will be able to be read in /mnt/usb_storage1 or /mnt/usb_storage2.   If the drives are formatted with NTFS (as the My Book drives shown above are), it is recommended that you reformat them with ext3.