I'm trying to mount a USB external hard-drive to my machine. When I plug the HDD into my system, UDEV creates a bunch of "usbdev1.xx_epxx" character device files in /dev, but I am unable to mount any of these:

viper@viper:/media$ sudo mount /dev/usbdev1.12_ep00 /media/usb_dev1
mount: /dev/usbdev1.12_ep00 is not a block device

If I remove the device and try again, it creates a new set (about 4 to 6 files) with a new increment of the same file name pattern.

Neither the System Monitor, nor the Disk Manager program I installed will see any non-internal drives so I'm staring at the /dev folder as I put in and remove my device.

Any ideas?

What does "fdisk -l" show?

What distro do you use?

Im sorry, I thought I was in the Ubuntu forums for some reason. I'm using Ubuntu Hardy.

I will have to wait until I get home to tell you what fdisk -l shows, but I have an idea what might be wrong:

Mounting a regular USB thumb-drive works just fine (and automatically pops up in Gnome, etc...) but I'm not working with a regular external hard-drive. It's an MP3 player that acts as an external HDD in Windows... I think it acts that way only when it has a hardware-specific driver installed because it doesn't recognize the hard-drive inside the MP3 player without the driver.

So I guess I'm out of luck unless they make a Linux driver, would you agree?

Post the make/model of your player. Your player probably only uses the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP)and not the mass storage class so you can not use it as a normal USB drive.

There are many linux MTP applications. Amarok,Audacious,gnomad2 and Rhythmbox are just few.

Phillips GoGear 30G Player
I would have never guessed the existence of an MTP! Very interesting... I will have to try that out tonight, thanks for the tip!

In Windows, I install a driver and Windows Media Player/Media Control Center picks it up as a standard MP3 device to sync with. Once Media Player picks it up, I can skip the Windows Media Player interface (that is slow and annoying) and just open up Windows Explorer and browse to the player like a USB storage device and interface with it directly.

So how would these programs work with MTP? Is it functionality embedded in the individual programs, or do I need to have a daemon or something running? And would it be a Plug-n-Play like functionality or do I have to do some maneuvering to access the device?

Many applications use the libmtp library to implement the MTP protocol. The application will access the device.

Amarok did not detect my Phillips GoGear, however I "added a device" anyway and hit the "Connect" button hoping some miracle to happen... and it happened! I was TOTALLY surprised especially since I didn't specify an interface (USB).

Thanks for telling me about the MTP deal. I'm now that much less dependent on M$!!! Way too cool.