Hi,

I remeber a discussion here a month or so back about using Freesurfer with USB hard drives. People were having problems because the hard drive changed file names to lower case (i.e. cor instead of COR). The solution posted to the list was a script that would rename all cor files to uppercase.

There is an easier way. You can reformat the drive with an ext3 file system. Ext3 is the (default) Linux file system, and provides support for case-sensitive file names (as well as permissions, links, etc). So once re-formatted you will no longer have the re-naming problem.

Two warnings. 1) Reformatting will destroy ALL data on the drive; be prepared before you do this. 2) Windows cannot read ext3 file systems. Reformatting will make your drive unreadable to any Windows-based machine.

To do it, as root:
umount /media/usbharddisk           # make sure the drive is not mounted
mke2fs -j [device /dev]                  # reformat drive

where [device /dev] is the link in the /dev directory where the drive is located. It should be something like /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb1. You can tell by looking at the output of dmesg. Look for a section like this:
-------------------- begin terminal output ---------------------------
user@machine $ dmesg
..........
usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 3
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.
Vendor: Maxtor    Model: OneTouch          Rev: 0201
Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
SCSI device sdb: 490232832 512-byte hdwr sectors (250999 MB)
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sdb: 490232832 512-byte hdwr sectors (250999 MB)
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
sdb: sdb1        <---- LOOK HERE
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
usb-storage: device scan complete
----------------------------end terminal output------------------

The key line is sdb: sdb1 , which tells me that my disk is linked via sdb1, so to reformat I type

mke2fs -j /dev/sdb1

+glenn

-- 

I want to go farther, farther!

          A. E. L.

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