Hi folks,

I'm having some trouble with an 2TB external hard drive I bought from Western Digital. It's called a My Book or something. When I plug the hard drive into the wall and then connect up the USB 2.0 connection, it shows up in the 'Computer' section as 'USB Drive' but then is a little grayed out. I then get the 'Unable to Mount Location: Can't mount file' error message when I double-click on it. When I right-click and hit 'Mount Volume', nothing happens.

I'm not sure if there aren't correct drivers for this piece of software or what. When I called the manufacturer's customer support, I was told that the company does not support linux and that this was the source of the problem. This might be true, but I figured I would post on here and see if anyone had some bright ideas. Let me know if you guys need more information like my system specs or something. I'm running fedora 9.

I'm kind of new to linux so...be gentle.

Thanks,
Tim

Hello, for me it looks not like a missing driver. I think that the mount-command does not know which filesystem it has to mount. On a new big external harddrive I think it would be ntfs. Try:
where you have to look which /dev/sd?? exists and can be mounted.

I suggest to read the mount-manpage.

Markus

Hi.
First of all, you need to check what kind of filesystem you have on that new hard drive. You can do it easily with gparted. It is common for hard drives not to be formatted when they're new.

If it is not formatted, format it to NTFS if you want to use it with windows too.
After formatting try to mount it as you tried before. Hopefully it will work.

If it is formatted, than you need to find out which block device is your external drive.
Use gparted again. In the upper right corner you'll find a scroll down menu. Here you will see /dev/sda. Click the menu and select the external drive. Now, you need to read what is written there. This is what you need to mount. To do that, use the command markush provided in the previous post.

ou DO KNOW that fedora 9 is PAST IT'S END OF LIFE and there will NEVER be any updates to it EVER !

there is now NO WAY to keep fedora 9 "up to date" seeing as there will never be any more updates to it .
only fedora 10 and 11 are supported.


the drivers in fedora 11 are updated and fedora 11 should auto mount the usb drive.

I think that what John VV is saying is that "fedora 9" is a bit .... Old.

You might have a happier time with linux if you used a more recent distribution: Most things will "just work". And external HDDs are one of these things that "just work", if your linux is up to date.

Linux improves all the time (if you use "unstable" distros), or every few months (eg the stable distros ( the 'buntus, perhaps )) otherwise.

You really need to keep up to date. Linux is very different from windows: "Up to date" means weeks / months for linux, not waiting for years (windows).

Anyway, Welcome to LQ! Hope you have a happy & productive time here.

Hiya Folks,

Thanks a lot for all your feedback! I tested the external hard drive on a different machine I have which was running fedora 11 and it worked fine. I was able to recognize the external hard drive and mount it with no problem.

I backed up all my files on my fedora 9 machine and am currently installing fedora 11. I guess it really DOES pay to be up to date.

Thanks again for all your help. I'm glad nobody was too harsh on this Linux noob.

Tim

we were all new at one time .