USB Hard Disk Drives (USB) and Linux

NTFS in LINUX is experimental for writing. SUSE and several other distributions take caution when mounting NTFS partitions and you will usually end up with this:

mount /usb
ls -ld /usb
dr-x------  2 root root 16384 Jan  1  1970 /usb
umount /usb

When mounting an NTFS format external USB HDD with mount /usb and an entry like this in fstab:

/dev/sda1               /usb           auto    noauto,owner,user 0 0

If you want to write to the USB drive, use fat32 and you can still use it under Windows or Mac. Windows XP can not format fat32 about 32 gigabytes but someone compiled mkdosfs for windows to format fat32 above the 32 gigabyte limit. You can download mkdosfs, or your distribution might provide it as a package. Suse provides the dosfstools package.