Linux not reading external hard drive
 

hi i'm useing suse 10 and it can't read my external hard drive. it is a western digital combo 75 gb drive when i plug it into my computer(usb) it shows up in "my computer" but when i try to open it i get the error message:
Unable to mount the selected volume.

mount: can't find /dev/sda1 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

i've look in the partioning program in yast and it thinks the hard drive is all free(which i know isn't true). any help would be good. thx

You need to mount it. First, create a folder somewhere. For example, I'll say it is /home/disk and assume that you have a FAT32 disk. Here's how to mount the disk:

sudo mount -t vfat disk_location /home/disk

Now the hard drive is mounted and you should see it. If you have an NTFS disk you need to replace "vfat" with "ntfs." And as to device locations, USB and SATA disks are designated /dev/sd*, where /dev/sda is the first SATA/USB device, /dev/sdb is the second, dev/sdc the third and so forth. That is the disk's location, but you must mount a specific partition to read data. If you have only one partition (just formatted the disk and that's all), then you mount /dev/sd*1.

So if you have an ATA internal hard drive and that USB external with only one FAT32 partiton, you would type in

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /home/disk.

Thanks works great now.