I am not bringing up excuses for the fact that I haven’t posted in a long while… I was pondering over life’s happenings and it seems that I pondered a bit too much. I stayed away from writing, reading, music,  movies and funnily, it seems that I stayed away from things that I appreciate the most. Anyways, Don’t Repeat it, Arif!

Lets move on… and let this post be the one that rekindles my interest with things again. Lots of things have been happening lately, I finished my studies (for now.. ) and I am on the highway of exploring things on a lot of fronts. Which brings me back to the Notion Ink Adam tablet (Ok, ok,  I hear ‘Oh No! Not again’ )

Tell you what, ok I am disappointed with the fact that I didn’t get what I dreamed for in that device, but I decided to make do with what I got. Better moving that way, right?

As you might have seen/heard from around, the Adam has had lots of unkept promises when it came out. Hardware wise I felt it was great, but the software was just way off the mark. Along comes a savior in the form of a super-live community where anything seems to be possible, and thus we, the ‘fans’, continue to survive through the rough.

I rooted (read: removed ‘stock ROM/OS’, and went for ‘customized installations’ which gives you more freedom with benefits) my tablet and after venturing through a lot of ROMS (will go in detailed in coming posts), I finally settled on the BEAST ROM. And I am currently working through its innerwear to stitch up the loose ends myself. I am not a hardcore programmer or anything of that sort, but my enthusiasm takes me places.

One of the biggest commotions that arose during the time when people started settling with the Adam was that the hard disks weren’t working. The device was touted to ‘plug-and-play’ hard disks of NTFS/FAT formats of any sizes and since that didn’t actually happen, obviously an outrage broke up.

But here is a small work around I found which would help you connect external hard disks based on the NTFS format.  (Found out from lots of experimenting and scurrying over forums). And its worked for me.

Make sure you have rooted your tablet to BEAST or equivalent, or Honeycomb, before you start because you certainly need access to the Android Market. (Or put it like, make sure you stay away from the STOCK ROM as of now, anything else is better)

Here is a step-by-step approach

1. Go to Android Market and install GScript Lite. Its a free terminal where you can initiate shell scripts from within Android.
2. Run GScript Lite after installation.
3. Click the menu button on the ADAM and click on Add Script
4. Write the following in
   NAME
   mount ntfs
   SCRIPT
   mount -t ntfs -o umask=000 /dev/block/sda1 /mnt/usbdisk
   
5. Click on save and now you see a new line ‘mount NTFS’
6. Now click on the menu button again and add a new script
   NAME
   unmount ntfs
   SCRIPT
   umount /usbdisk
   
7. Now ‘unmount NTFS’ is also available on the listAll you have to do now is attach a USB Hard disk and click on ‘mount NTFS’. If no errors appear, that means the hard disk is mounted. Proceed to your favorite file explorer app (ES File Explorer/ Astro/ Sniffer) and you will find your hard disk accessible. I connected my 500GB Western Digital external ‘My Book’ drive and I could access everything in Read Only mode. But once I unmounted it, I faced this small issue of not being able to mount any other drive/the same without rebooting the Adam. I guess its just a small issue which is solvable. (Will update the post when I get the solutions straight)I think this work around will work for any Android device and not just the Adam. And again, I just tried it on the Beast Rom.

Cheers!