I am a newbie, so please point me in the right direction is this question is already answered. I tried doing a general search and did not find exactly what i was wanting.

I am running Mandrake 10.1 on a dual boot with XP. I have a western digital 160 GB external harddrive connected through usb. I had the hd before i partitioned my internal hd so i am unsure that format the external hd is in, however linux will not recognize the files on the external hd.

Is it possible to access the files located on the external hd through linux? When i try to mount the drive it gives me:

"mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
or too many mounted file systems
Please check that the disk is entered correctly"

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated and please be general or lead me to directions that are for newbies.

Thanks in advance.

Well it is very important to find the fs of the external hd.
Try ntfs and vfat as they seem to be the most popular among manufacturer pre-formatted hds. I think there is a way to let mount find automatically the filesystem but I'm not sure.
man mount for more