Any one boot from a "My Passport" drive?

[weirdwolf]

If so have you reformatted it ? Any problems with doing so? I reformat all my other flash usb drives to Ext4. Got one today for 25.00 on clearance and is in NTFS. (250 gig)




Edit: Title

[Rudge]

You got a 250g flash drive for 25 bucks? I gave that for an 8g drive 2 years ago.. 

[djohnston]

weirdwolf,

I bought one off the shelf a year or two ago. 250GB drive. I just nuked the whole drive and took those Windows "tools" off. Works great. I've had it formatted as XFS, but it's now ext4. It will go into power saving mode when it's not in use for a while.

[weirdwolf]

Rudge, Yep, I thought that was "a pretty good deal". Don't have the foggiest what to do with it. Was only a couple months ago I was able to afford a 8 gig thumb drive, was around 12 bucks on sale IIRC. This "My Passport" is about six times larger than any drive I've had before If you have a "Target" store nearby you might want to check them out, it's where I got this one.

djohnston, Thanks! I stuck all the winders stuff in a "wdstuff" folder will probably nuke it later. I like the sound of that "power saving mode", haven't messed with it much yet.

[Rudge]

Rudge, Yep, I thought that was "a pretty good deal". Don't have the foggiest what to do with it. Was only a couple months ago I was able to afford a 8 gig thumb drive, was around 12 bucks on sale IIRC. This "My Passport" is about six times larger than any drive I've had before If you have a "Target" store nearby you might want to check them out, it's where I got this one.

djohnston, Thanks! I stuck all the winders stuff in a "wdstuff" folder will probably nuke it later. I like the sound of that "power saving mode", haven't messed with it much yet.

Holy Storage Device weirdwolf!  I will have to check my local Target. Thanks. LOL

I would wipe that sucker clean and format it. Can you say. "Unmentionables collection"? LOL

[pags]

I have a 500 GB "My Passport".  I shrunk the partition down, so that if it ever gets plugged into a Windows machine, Windows won't try and format it because it can't read it.  Windows tends to ignore partitions after the first primary one on external drives.  It was formatted FAT, at the time.  This way, I can copy stuff to that FAT partition, and share it with a Windows PC.  It now looks like this:

Code:

Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8d399bc0

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *          63    20964824    10482381    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdc2        20964825   976768064   477901620    5  Extended
/dev/sdc5        20964888   125821079    52428096   83  Linux
/dev/sdc6       125821143   976768064   425473461   83  Linux

My original idea was to install PCLOS on the 50 GB partition, and have the balance for data:

Code:

/dev/sdc1: LABEL="My Passport" UUID="BF18-0FA2" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdc5: UUID="c5a6cb9c-0c89-44f8-bc9b-2fbe44611735" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdc6: LABEL="Data" UUID="a50c9e9b-0cd2-452f-b878-858f385947f8" TYPE="ext4"

However, I haven't gotten around to doing the install, yet (probably because I have a tiny (20GB) USB HDD with PCLOS on it already, which is a great portable little install I can carry around)...

[Georgetoon]

I just bought my second "My Passport" drive.  I bought the model that holds 1 terabyte of data.  I didn't do any reformatting due to needing it for the office and a Windows 7 system. 

I had to buy a new Passport because the cord doesn't last as long as the drive.  After constant use, it tends to weaken and the connection becomes spotty.  Plus,  Western Digital put an extra data line in the cord. So, if you buy an off the shelf replacement, it's not going to work. MicroCenter told me it has to be ordered from WD.

So, I copied the old drive to my PLinuxOS system, then copied it all to my new drive.  Not everything copied over.  so, Il probably have to get thst replacement cord for the old drive sometime in the near future.

[pags]

I just bought my second "My Passport" drive.  I bought the model that holds 1 terabyte of data.  I didn't do any reformatting due to needing it for the office and a Windows 7 system. 

I had to buy a new Passport because the cord doesn't last as long as the drive.  After constant use, it tends to weaken and the connection becomes spotty.  Plus,  Western Digital put an extra data line in the cord. So, if you buy an off the shelf replacement, it's not going to work. MicroCenter told me it has to be ordered from WD.

So, I copied the old drive to my PLinuxOS system, then copied it all to my new drive.  Not everything copied over.  so, Il probably have to get thst replacement cord for the old drive sometime in the near future.

Really?

That's sounds like BS.  I'd recheck who you give your money to.

Admittedly, I'm using an older, 500 GB model, but I use all kinds of different USB cables with (whatever I have on hand...Blackberry changed the end on their newest model, so it's non-standard  , so I'm currently using the USB cable that came with my previous BB).

Now, I do agree there are good quality cables, and poor quality, and it pays to use a good quality...but I dislike vendors who mess around with the specs just to get you to buy a proprietary cable (Sony, Olympus, RIM... ).  If WD is going down this road, as well, I don't think I'll be giving them any more money, either!

[Georgetoon]

I just bought my second "My Passport" drive.  I bought the model that holds 1 terabyte of data.  I didn't do any reformatting due to needing it for the office and a Windows 7 system. 

I had to buy a new Passport because the cord doesn't last as long as the drive.  After constant use, it tends to weaken and the connection becomes spotty.  Plus,  Western Digital put an extra data line in the cord. So, if you buy an off the shelf replacement, it's not going to work. MicroCenter told me it has to be ordered from WD.

So, I copied the old drive to my PLinuxOS system, then copied it all to my new drive.  Not everything copied over.  so, Il probably have to get thst replacement cord for the old drive sometime in the near future.

Really?

That's sounds like BS.  I'd recheck who you give your money to.

Admittedly, I'm using an older, 500 GB model, but I use all kinds of different USB cables with (whatever I have on hand...Blackberry changed the end on their newest model, so it's non-standard  , so I'm currently using the USB cable that came with my previous BB).

Now, I do agree there are good quality cables, and poor quality, and it pays to use a good quality...but I dislike vendors who mess around with the specs just to get you to buy a proprietary cable (Sony, Olympus, RIM... ).  If WD is going down this road, as well, I don't think I'll be giving them any more money, either!

This is what a sales rep at MicroCenter told me. I tried a couple of different replacement cords on the old WDMYP, and neither worked.

[pags]

Think it might be a quality issue with WD (see here and here).

Too bad...I was hoping to pickup a small +1TB external...might push WD down the list...

[Georgetoon]

Think it might be a quality issue with WD (see here and here).

Too bad...I was hoping to pickup a small +1TB external...might push WD down the list...

Thanks for this info. 

[weirdwolf]

....Don't have the foggiest what to do with it.  yet.

A update to that. I'm now using it as my "main" hard drive. It's faster than my old Pata 40gig (a bit bigger too ), and It installed and boots PCLinuxOS-LXDE quite nicely!

[djohnston]

Change title of first post to "Booting from ... " ?? 

[ostrosky.jeremiah]

I've had the best luck so far with my Seagate Free Agent external USB hard drive.  It's 500GB and cost me around $50 about 6 months ago.  I used to use it to boot PCLinuxOs LXDE from and had no issues but have since reformatted it to ntfs due to the need to use it on a windoze 7 box at work.  Either way it works great and I havent had any issues with cables either.  Currently it's attached to a Dell Optiplex GX260 2.0Ghz P4, 2GB Ram with an 80GB internal HDD and I use it as a secondary backup device (can't be too safe) and it's shared with all the computers on my home network via Samba.  The only issue I came across when setting this up was permissions issues w/the Win boxes originally.  When I would connect to the share from a winxp box I had read-only access.  I edited the entry for the drive in fstab and it's worked flawlessly since.

[Duvid]

Also purchased WD 250 gig Passport, $30.00....seems Target has these specials on the "older" and "smaller" sizes. I have this dedicated as my portable KDE PCLOS with persistence, using the PCLOS Live usb creator. Left a small partition for windows based stuff. Good use when I am at someones house without linux, and when they need something fixed.