I'm using an MSI Trident X Plus with Ubuntu 18.04.3 installed and am having trouble with accessing files on an external hard drive.

Disclaimer, this machine had previously been locked down to prevent internet connectivity ++ a few other security issues, possibly including preventing reading or writing files to EHD. It was supposed to have been re-set and some of the settings (such as internet connectivity) have been restored; however, I have a sneaking suspicion that this issue I am experiencing is related to the previous cybersecurity settings.

On the off chance that this is a simpler issue, I'm hoping someone on this forum might be able to help me troubleshoot.

I've run the command lsusb in terminal and confirmed that the EHD is recognized in one of the USB ports

I've also run the command gnome-disks to open disk utility and it doesn't show up either as a mounted or unmounted hard disk

I've confirmed that the EHD does mount on other linux machines and I've tried mounting other EHDs to this machine, no dice.

Is there a command I should be using to attempt to mount an EHD?

And/or if anyone knows of how I would assess the security settings on a linux machine to identify whether mounting and/or read/writing to EHDs has been locked down, I would appreciate it!

The mount command, for example
where sdb1 refers to partition 1 on a disk, and /mnt/mymontpoint is the directory where you want to mount the partition.
I don't know, but you could try the mount command. It needs to be executed as root.

Since the Gnome mount tool doesn't list the disk, I wonder if it has a filesystem. Can you report the output of
to confirm this?