I have a few noob questions regarding mounting. I've done some searching but the search results always deal with advanced mounting issues that are way beyond me. I don't mind reading if someone can point me in the right direction (i.e. to an article/how to).

PS - I'm running MINT 7 as a VirutalBox guest on a Vista 64-bit host. Under devices I enabled USB and the Seagate drive that I'm attempting to mount. So, the fact I'm running linux in a virtualbox might be the problem.

I read the Community Ubuntu Documentation on Mounting Manually and it said:

Run: sudo fdisk -l
"Find your device in the list, it is probably something like /dev/sdb1"

1) I ran fdisk -l to view drives. It returned
/dev/sda1 (System = Linux)
/dev/sda2 (System = Extended)
/dev/sda5 (System = SWAP)

I assume these are logical drives (partitions on the primary drive), not external drives. Right?

How am I supposed to know which drive is which? Sda1, Sda2, Sda5, etc... How do I determine if one of these drives is my external USB Hard Drive. How do I determine what these drives are?

2) I know the commands to use, but I cannot *find* my external USB hard drive anywhere.

I tried to use an app called Pysdm, but Pysdm couldn't find my USB drive either.

So, how do I find my drive? Is the problem due to using VirtualBox? How do I know which drives are which (sda1, sda2, etc.)?

Thanks in advance.

Hello atomn,

you'll first have to tell VirtualBox that you want to use your external device as a so called "shared device". You'll find this in the settings for your virtual machine in the vbox-menu.
Once you've configured the drive as a shared device, you should be able to find it on the Linux-guestsystem.
If you've enabled the external drive in vbox, you'll look into the /dev directory in Linux to find out if there are any other files as /dev/hda or /dev/hdb or /dev/sdb and so on. This may be your external drive.

Markus

First of all, BIG THANKS Markus. What you said makes perfect sense. I was so busy trying to figure it out in Linux that I kind of forgot about VirtualBox. I didn't realize I had to shared drives. I thought that I could just 'enable' them.

One more question. How will I know which drive is my USB HDD? Will it show up as a directory? /dev/hdb/... ? Is there a way to view the contents, or view the characteristics of the drive?

I will give your suggestion a try and get back to you. Thanks!

Hello,

you may execute the following commands:and if your not sure please poste the output here.

Markus