Can't access my files on external drive
 

Hello guys, my name is Diego and I'm newbie, this is actually my first post. I recently installed Linux Mint 19.1 in my computer, everything is great so far, I love it, except that I can't access my external drive, when I open it in my gf's computer there is no problem so I know the files are there, I can't figure out how to mount the thing, I've tried a lot of things looking on threads, so far nothing has worked. Could you please help me out?

Welcome to LQ.

Assuming it is a USB external drive?

When you plug it in, it should automatically mount. Open the File manager and see on the left if you see information about the drive.

Typically it would mount and open a File manager window automatically, but sometimes things mount and don't always open a File manager window. Or there could be some sort or problem.

Otherwise, you can see what is happening by viewing your system log.

Open a Terminal to use the Command Line, and before you plug in the drive, issue the command dmesg[return]. This will dump your system log, a lot of stuff you aren't looking for, in fact, the reason you're doing it now is so you can see what the end of it looks like, so that after when you plug in the drive, you can see any new records to that log. Next, do plug in the drive, wait about 5-10 seconds, and then issue the dmesg command again and see if there are any new entries.

Please copy and paste those new entries in an update and perhaps we can see something which will help you further.

Thanks rtmistler for your quick reply.. First, yes, it is a USB external drive, and it appears in the File manager, I can see it there but it won't mount or open.

I did what you told me and this is the message I got.

[ 88.622526] usb 1-3: new high-speed USB device number 4 using xhci_hcd
[ 88.771593] usb 1-3: New USB device found, idVendor=04e8, idProduct=61b6
[ 88.771600] usb 1-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=11, SerialNumber=3
[ 88.771605] usb 1-3: Product: Samsung M3 Portable
[ 88.771610] usb 1-3: Manufacturer: JMicron
[ 88.771614] usb 1-3: SerialNumber: 00000000011E1CCE
[ 88.830874] [UFW BLOCK] IN=wlp3s0 OUT= MAC= SRC=0000:0000:0000:0000:0196:8689:5f45:4d32 DST=ff02:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001 LEN=64 TC=0 HOPLIMIT=1 FLOWLBL=257968 PROTO=UDP SPT=8612 DPT=8612 LEN=24
[ 88.866398] usb-storage 1-3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[ 88.866689] scsi host2: usb-storage 1-3:1.0
[ 88.866884] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[ 88.888242] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas
[ 91.923684] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access Samsung M3 Portable 3 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[ 91.924698] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[ 93.944181] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] 1953504688 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
[ 93.944471] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 93.944477] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 27 00 00 00
[ 93.944761] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[ 93.944773] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 93.973862] sdb: sdb1
[ 93.975608] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

It looks like it's being detected by the system, which is good news. But is it formatted with a filesystem, is the question?

Can you open up a terminal window and type the following command, and post the results using CODE tags,

Make sure the USB drive is connected when you do this.

It looks like it isn't mounted, but it is formatted with NTFS. Do you have the ntfs-3g package installed?

I suspect you might not, and that's why it can't mount it - because it doesn't understand the filesystem.

Thank you very much! That did it!