[Cialug] External Hard Drive

[Matt Stanton]

I recently bought a WD My Passport (500GB) external USB-powered HD for 
my HP mini, on which I'm running Ubuntu Netbook Remix.  I am using it as 
a portable media drive.  So, I needed it to be recognized by windows and 
linux.  I plugged it into my home PC, running Vista Ultimate x64, 
deleted all the WD software on the drive (backup/sync software), and 
transfered all my anime, tv shows, movies, and mp3s to it (without doing 
any sort of formatting).  When I finally got everything transfered (a 5 
hour affair), I plugged it into my netbook and linux recognized it and 
everything on it perfectly... even automounted it.

Other than having to grab some gstreamer plugins for the necessary 
codecs, everything worked out of the box.  The only thing that comes to 
mind that I haven't tried to do is save something from linux to the 
drive, since I don't use the netbook to download stuff.  Checking the 
filesystem, it seems that it came formatted as FAT32.

Hope this helps.