Need Help, I unmounted external USB HDD, now will not mount
 

Hello All,

I am fairly new to linux (trying to transition away from MS Products) so I am at a bit of a loss here.

I have an external Maxtor USB Hard drive that have a host of files on that I need to use to transfer files from to my new openSuse 11 box. When I first plugged it in, it worked just fine. I transferred my first set of files and all was good.

HOWEVER, after the first transfer was complete I right clicked on the icon on the desktop, and hit "Unmount", because I thought that's what I should do before I physically removed the drive. Now, when I connect the drive to the system it does not show up and I really don't know what to do to get it to work again.

Any help would be very much appreciated!!!

Not sure from Desktop, but if you can:

start a terminal session
su to root ("su -" then enter root password)
type "fdisk -l" and identify the drive (hopefully it will be pretty clear).
Assuming the device is /dev/sb1, then type "mount /dev/sb1 /mnt"

You should see the drive in /mnt.

SuSE has a nice command called "halmount" that you can try. If you know the label of the disk, you can enter "halmount /media/<labelname>".
You can also use the device node as in "halmount /dev/sdb1". It will be mounted under /media. If the disk doesn't have a label, usually it gets mounted as /media/disk for the first on and /media/disk-1 for the second.

Look at the output of "ls -a /media/". There may be a stale .hal-mtab file.

An easy way to check on what the device is, is to list them:
ls /dev/sd*

If you only have one external drive, it is probably /dev/sdb1 that you want.

example:
sudo mkdir /mnt/usbdisk
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usbdisk -o uid=<yourusername>,fmask=177,dmask=077,noexec

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It might be worthwile reading the log file (/var/log/messages) around the time that you reinserted the usb drive. Is there a message about the filesystem being bad? You should see something like

Thank you, I was able to get this resolved..