I just purchased a Western Digital My Book 320GB External USB Hard Drive. I formated it NTFS on my Windows computer, then connected it to my Fedora 7 Linux computer and got an error message when trying to mount it. Heres what I did.

I made a directory in the /mnt folder called usbdrive. Then I tried to mount it this way...

mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usbdrive

And heres the error message I got...

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 1)
Failed to mount '/dev/sdc1': Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:

Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.

Choice 2: If you don't have Windows then you can use the 'force' option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usbdrive -o force

Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sdc1 /mnt/usbdrive ntfs-3g force 0 0

The device shows up in the GUI for Logical Volume Management with all the correct properties except that it says "Uninitialized Disk Entity /dev/sdc1." I'm wondering if it would be risky to use the force option to mount it?

(I also formatted it as a primary partition on my Windows computer. Don't know if that makes a difference.)

Will

First, you might try simply specifying that it is an NTFS partition in your mount command (as suggested in the error message).
You are doing this as root, right? I'm not sure if Fedora 7 includes the ntfs-3g driver, but you might get simply '-t ntfs' to work.
--- rod.

I went to a Fedora 7 Tips and Tricks website and downloaded NTFS support using yum..

# yum -y install ntfs-3g-devel ntfs-config

I tried mounting it again and it failed but after I rebooted the computer things seem to be working ok.

Now it say New Volume detected with 299GB. Not the 320 but I guess thats ok.

I did a df -h and got this...
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda8 22G 715M 21G 4% /
/dev/sda2 246G 29G 205G 13% /home
/dev/sda1 99M 17M 77M 19% /boot
tmpfs 506M 0 506M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda6 1.9G 36M 1.8G 2% /tmp
/dev/sda5 3.8G 2.1G 1.6G 58% /var
/dev/sda3 15G 3.2G 11G 24% /usr
/dev/sdc1 299G 74M 299G 1% /mnt/usbdrive
/dev/sdd1 299G 74M 299G 1% /media/New Volume

I'm thinking I can delete the /mnt/usbdrive since /media is using it. Pardon all the partitions. Under the NTFS Configuration Tool its labeled as /dev/sdd1 /media/New Volume with a checkmark next to it.

Using the GUI Logical Volume Management its still labeled "Uninitialized Disk Entity /dev/sdd1." with an "Initialize Entity" button to click. I have butterflys about doing that.

Thanks for the help.

Will

In Linux and most other computer-speak, a Gigabyte is 2^30 (2 to the 30th power). If you are selling disk drives, it makes your drive look bigger if you use Gigabytes that are 10^9, 1.0 billion.
My hunch is that the drive is not part of any logical volume group, which explains the message you see. I'm pretty sure that putting it into such a group would make it unworkable from the Windows side. If you don't have anything of value stored on it, why don't you go ahead and try it, and report the results back here?
--- rod.

A 320GB drive is the un-formatted size. Once you format it with a file system the available amount is less due to the amount taken by the formatting.

I added it to a logical volume group using the gui and it disapeared somewhere and I couldn't find it. I removed it from the logical volume group and it came back with the little icon on my desktop. So I don't really know how that all happened. It seems to be working fine though.

Will