Okay, I've just recently bought a 160GB USB2.0 external hard drive. The drive works fine on Windows XP but not on Linux (Mandrake Linux 10.1). My Linux is able to detect other USB peripherals such as the flash drive.

Is there any way to get Linux to detect the drive?

when you plug the drive in, and run the command
, you should get some info about whether its found or not, and what the system has done with it. Please do paste here the relevant lines, or if you cannot figure out what is relevant, the last few screeefulls should have all we need.. (:

I am having a similar problem although my computer reads the drive. The 'demsg' command reads:

usb 4-6: new high speed USB device using address 2
SCSI subsystem initialized
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: ST312002 Model: 6A Rev: 0 0
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
USB Mass Storage device found at 2
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.
SCSI device sda: 234441648 512-byte hdwr sectors (120034 MB)
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
EXT3 FS on hda1, internal journal
Adding 1124508k swap on /dev/hda5. Priority:-1 extents:1
Linux agpgart interface v0.100 (c) Dave Jones

when I try to open the drive it says that the format may not be able to be mounted. Is there anyway to fix this?

what filesystem is your drive formatted in?

if it's in NTFS, then linux won't automatically reconize it.

if it's FAT32, mandrake should automount it.

you can convert NTFS to FAT32 without losing any data with partition magic.

there is also a NTFS rpm on http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ if you want to try that

What do you mean by 'open' ? What kind of error do you get when attempting to mount it as root:

You may also want to try sda2, sda3 and so on, it depends on which port you stick it in.