External USB HD!
 

Hello Everyone,

I have Ubuntu 8.4 and I have External hard drive USB 2.0 every time i try to plug it in it says that cant mount the volume "WD Passport".


any ideas?

thanks for the help!

ok, im going to guess that your external hd is ntfs? thats where most of the problems start

all you need to do in this case is get an ntfs driver
the best one is ntfs-3g http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

then, find your device in /dev
since yours is an external hd, it would probably /dev/sda1 or something

then, mount it with the new ntfs-3g driver:

replace <device> with the actual device
replace <mountpoint> with the actual mountpoint you want to use

and that should work


good luck,
rabbit2345

Hi,

I believe Ubuntu 8.4 already has the ntfs-3g package.

Rabbit,
thanks allot for the reply, but i am afraid that i am a total noob, can you please explain it further for me??

how can i find out what is the device in /dev??

how can i know what is the actual mount point that i want to use??

thanks again!

ok, i'm going to try and help you find your device

but the one thing is, are you sure that your device label is "WD Passport"? spaces are not allowed in device labels

but anyway,

plug ur hd in

go to : /dev/disk/by-label and find the device file (in linux, all devices are represented as files in /dev) with "WD Passport" for a name

it will be a link to another file. don't worry about this

if you can't find it, just go to /dev/disk/by-id
there will be a bunch of crap in this folder, but find the device that has usb- in the begining and ends in -part1

a mount point is a folder where a device's contents are read and placed into that folder.
so if i mount /dev/hda1 (fake) on /mnt/hard, then the contents on /dev/hda1 will replace anything inside /mnt/hard

the best place to mount stuff is /mnt (yeah)

so you can run this from the command line:
mkdir is "make directory" or make a new folder
the -p aurgument means make parent directories, make any folders that aren't there already.

so if you wanted to make a folder in /mnt/hard/good, you would normally have to run mkdir twice, but if you just run mkdir -p /mnt/hard/good, it makes the parent directories that aren't already there

and you can change /mnt/usb to anything you want, maybe you want it to be mounted under /mnt/jackson or something

then, all you need to do is run to mount command:

replace <device> with the device file you found in /dev/disk/by-id
so if your device in that folder was usb-123456789-part1 (fake), then you can run:

assuming that you want to mount at /mnt/usb


good luck,
rabbit2345 ^_^

Thank you so much Rabbit, it worked like a charm thanks again, wow im soooo happy lol