newbie: unable to mount external HD manually

sirpelidor · 03-23-2010, 06:19 AM

Hi, I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (IDE) hard drive that was used in winxp as a secondary disk.

When I tried to connect it to my Ubuntu laptop via usb cable, it doesn't recognize on its' own.

Then I figured I might have to mount it manually, and run into a following problem:

Code:

root@tux:/media# mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb usb
Failed to read bootsector (size=0)
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb' doesn't have a valid NTFS.
Maybe you selected the wrong device? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/hda, not /dev/hda1)? Or the other way around?

I know this for fact is NTFS drive (cause i formatted it), but for the sake of testing, I'm gonna try vfat...

Code:

root@tux:/media# mount -t vfat /dev/sdb usb
mount: /dev/sdb: can't read superblock

I put the disk back to winxp, and looks like it is functioning... so maybe I was missing something?

check dmesg...

Code:

root@tux:/media# dmesg |tail
[   71.790146] USB Mass Storage support registered.
[   71.790372] usb-storage: device found at 2
[   71.790375] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[  195.375132] usb-storage: device scan complete
[  195.376120] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access     USB TO I DE/SATA Device   0041 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[  195.387108] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[  195.387208] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[   83.362204] FAT: unable to read boot sector
[  234.538559] FAT: Unrecognized mount option "nolock" or missing value
[  292.838181] FAT: unable to read boot sector

ok..it doesn't like FAT for some reason?? and interesting thing was... sdb doesn't even show up in fdisk...

Code:

root@tux:/media# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x036f960c

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        4659    37423386   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            4660        4864     1646662+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5            4660        4864     1646631   82  Linux swap / Solaris
root@tux:/media# fdisk -l /dev/sdb
root@tux:/media#

Since the drive is working, I must be missing something silly.

Thank you

smoker · 03-23-2010, 06:31 AM

Did you try

Code:

mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 usb

What does lsusb say when it's plugged in ?

smoker · 03-23-2010, 06:32 AM

? posted twice with one click - that's power for ya !

allend · 03-23-2010, 08:42 AM

Any chance that the disk is using GPT?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
Slackware did not have GPT support compiled into the kernel by default, at least until recently. CONFIG_EFI is now set in the 2.6.33 kernel in Slackware-current.

sirpelidor · 03-23-2010, 07:02 PM

aaahh after a long battle, I finally get it to work. It was extremely silly... I had to set the jumper to "master" instead of "slave" in order to get the usb to read :P

smoker · 03-23-2010, 07:26 PM

Is this post solved now then ?