So I have this webserver thats been laying around for a year and a half or so. Needless to say, its horribly out of date, and running Fedora Core 3. Add this to the equation: I have a brand new laptop and a 400gb external harddrive. I've set up my webserver for FTP, SSH, and apache. So basically, now that I have a laptop and all my music and pictures are on my external HD, I want to be able to access them anywhere. The idea is simple. Stick the HD on the webserver then I should be able to FTP to from anywhere and listen to music or whatever. The problem is accessing the HD. I plugged it in to the webserver and a folder named "usbdisk" appeared in the /media directory. For some reason, its empty. The permissions are ok, even as root nothing appears. Anyone know what might be causing this? Maybe someone can post some mount commands I could play around with? Thanks guys.

What format is the external disk using? Maybe your mount command is assuming the wrong filesystem format. See "man mount" and see the -t (type) option for all the filesystems that can be mounted.

Hey, I figured it out. No matter what mount command I used, I couldn't get anything to show up in /media/usbdisk but for some strange reason, when I mounted it in another place, like /mnt/usb it worked fine. Weird but an easy fix.

Although now I've come across another strange problem, the external usb hard drive seems to be stuck in read only mode, changing the permissions just results in them getting changed back again, no error messages or anything. When I try to upload I dont get any errors, but also no progress. Nothing unusual in fstab. Any ideas?

could you post the line in fstab?
could you also post the output of fdisk -l as root?

Even if you get it to work, chances are it will be horribly slow. I think it wasn't before 2.4 that high-speed usb became useable (at least for me).