Topic: Guide to mounting a USB Drive and connecting it to an i-bay

[ber]

Hi all!, I'm struggling and need some help with regards to mounting a USB memory storage drive and then enabling that drive to be visible on the network as an I-bay. I am intending to use this i-bay as a backup in case of hardware failure. My accounts data file is kept on the server but would like greater redundancy just in case the box dies. I have googled everywhere and have lots of information but just cant tie it all together. Can anyone give a beginner a hand with some simple commands that may help...I spent two days trying to figure out how to edit the fstab...go figure about where I'm at with Linux. I just don't want to mess my box up- its running well and fought hard and long to get this far!, Thanks in advance...Also can the file system on the USB be windows compatible...My servers are linux, workstations are MS XP. I use quickbooks 7.5 Pro for my accounting program. 

[David Harper]

Obvious question first:

Have you read http://wiki.contribs.org/AddExtraHardDisk ?

[Per]

The wiki howto should solve most of your problem.
Some additional thoughts:
FAT32 are compatible with both windows and linux but suffer a 4 GB file size limit.
A better alternative would be ext2 or ext3, drivers for windows can be found at http://www.fs-driver.org/
And of course, you are not experimenting on your production box
Adding a drive this way can be very useful, but could also cause system instability, if you for example pull out the USB cord without proper unmounting.

[versa]

Im not sure if this will help
http://wiki.contribs.org/USBDisks
ther is also a contrrib for mounting usb disks
http://wiki.contribs.org/Disk_Manager

it is also possable to have the usb drive as an ibay but I'm not sure about the fat32 bit