firewire

The hard drive was connected to Redhat9 Linux via firewire and the hard drive had a reiserfs filesystem. It was supposed to be used for backups, but suddenly stopped working (it was not anymore recognized during system startup). Probably that had something to do with the external USB zip drive. Both are apparently visible to the system as SCSI devices and the zip drive might have (via automount) occupied the sda number that was manually added to /etc/fstab to enable the Maxtor hard drive. To check whether everything is OK with the drive itself, I connected it to my work computer.

I didn't know how to format an unformatted drive under Linux. I attached a firewire case with an old 12 GB Macintosh-formatted HD to my computer. In order to format it with reiserfs, I used Yast2. I had to go to expert mode and rewrite the partition table. By this action Yast2 puts an entry into the fstab, that I modified to:

/dev/sda1 /media/firewire reiserfs noauto,user 0 0

since I don't want to have it connected every time I boot up. Instead I can now mount it as a regular user manually with:

mount /media/tmp/