I used to use a Seagate external HDD, but it keeps failing (I've been through 2 in a year), so I got a Rosewill external enclosure and a Western Digital HDD and plugged it into my old windows computer, took all the files off of my Seagate and computer and now I want to plug it into my new Ubuntu based computer and it says:

Unable to mount new volume
DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

How do I get the drive to mount? This drive, after transferring all my files to the new computer will be used strictly as a back up drive, so if wiping it is needed, that's ok. I have the files elsewhere for now. One other thing, could you also tell me how to set the drive up as an auto backup? I have no idea what I am doing yet when it comes to linux.

Thank you all for your support and help.


Edit - I found out about fdisk -l and it returns:

Cannot open /dev/sda
cannot open /dev/sdf

I don't know what that means, but someone asks for the output in every question like this I've seen. So far, no one else had this output that I've seen.

Try GParted, installed by:

sudo apt-get install gparted,
or whatever package manager your distro uses.

This is the GUI version of parted, which is a bit more complicated. In GParted, within the menus, there's "devices", and your drive should show up. Then, lay down a new Partition Table, and format.

If it doesn't show up, try:

sudo lshw

and see if the drive shows up in the list of hardware. If not, then it may be a kernel/HAL thing, and I'd recommend searching on the internet with the info from lshw and your particular setup.