Maxtor OneTouch, HFS+ to ext3

I bought a Maxtor OneTouch 300GB external USB/Firewire drive a couple of years ago, mostly to save my iMovie experiments on my wife's Mac, but also to serve as a general backup device for my other Linux boxen. Because I had no box other than the Mac with a firewire port, I hooked it up there and -- due to the normal fear and ignorance computer manufacturers have come to expect from their users -- I ran the supplied installation CD.

That turned out to be a mistake.

The Mac formatted the file system on the drive as HFS+, of course. This was fine, as long as the drive was connected to the Mac. But when I plugged it into a Linux box, it was none-too-happy with HFS+ and would only mount the thing read-only.

So today, I finally got around to reformatting the drive as ext3. This turned out to be way easier than I thought it would. Actually, the hardest part was finding places to temporarily store the files that were on there during the reformatting. Once that was done, I simply plugged the thing into my Ubuntu Edgy laptop, fired up gparted, deleted the old partitions -- for some reason, there were three of them -- and then I created a single ext3 partition.

Using, I assume, some combination of "udev/hotplug/hal/gnome" magic, Ubuntu recognized the drive when I power-cycled it and automounted it (/dev/sdb) to /media/usbdisk. Not liking that name, I realized gparted hadn't prompted me for a volume label, so I then umounted it and ran:

  $ e2label /dev/sdb1 maxtor

I guess I'm in the right group to allow me to do that. Yanking and reinserting the USB cable now caused the ghosts in the machine to mount the drive at /media/maxtor. Perfect!

But alas, I couldn't write to it. :-(

  $ sudo chmod 777 /media/maxtor

There, all better. Now I'm off to move all my files back to it, and hook it up to a "real" file server. In doing so, I'll no longer benefit from all the udev automounting hocus pocus, because I'm pretty sure that's a gnome-ish feature. If I'm not logged into gnome, nothing shows up in /media when I connect the drive, though /var/log/messages does show the device being detected as /dev/sdb. I'm pretty sure I'll need to put something like the following in /etc/fstab:

  LABEL=maxtor  /mnt/maxtor  auto  defaults  0 0

I'll let you know if that doesn't work out.