Let me first appologize for my lack of knowledge regarding Linux.

I am running the latest Debian distro. on a budget PC.

I am running off of a IDE HD that is attached to hda and is dual boot (linux is on second half)

I am trying to mount a second HD on sda (at least I think it should be sda, it is physically plugged into SATA1 connection on the mobo).

I can see the HD using gnome when I double click on the "computer" icon but it will not allow me to look at the file system, I get the error "unable to mount selected volume"

I have an identical disk in a different pc (same file structure and partitions (exact copy)) When I do a "mount" on the working HD I see the following:

rootfs on / type unknown (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0622)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
/dev/sda5 on /some/directory/1 type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda6 on /some/directory/2 type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda7 on /some/directory/3 type ext2 (rw)
/dev/sda8 on /some/directory/4 type ext2 (rw)
/dev/sda9 on /some/directory/5 type ext2 (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /some/directory/6 type vfat (rw)

I have created a mount point on my pc: example:

/mnt/SATAHD/some/directory/6

and I run the command

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /some/directory/6

I get back an error saying "mount point /some/directory/6 does not exist"

I have double checked and I am confident that /some/directory/6 is intact and exists.

What concerns me even more is that when I do a "mount" to my pc that I am trying to add the second HD to it shows only info for the IDE drive and nothing concerning sda....help.

Thank you in advance for your posts!

What concerns me even more is that when I do a "mount" to my pc that I am trying to add the second HD to it shows only info for the IDE drive and nothing concerning sda....help.

'mount' is only going to give information for the file systems that are currently mounted. As you are having trouble mounting the sda drive, one should not expect to find any information about sda in the output of 'mount'.

'fdisk -a' should provide a list of all drives and their partitions, perhaps this output would be more helpful?

fdisk -a is telling me it is not a valid option...

Here is the output of fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 65 5338 42363373+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 * 5339 9729 35270707+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 1 64 514048+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris


Again, just my IDE drive info.

Apologies? We've all got to start somewhere!

Try 'sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/SATAHD/some/directory/6'

Nice catch, unfortunately it didn't fix my problem.

Now I am getting:

mount: special device /dev/sda1 does not exist

So back to square one.

For the sake of desperate measures, have you tried using hdb (regardless of position, my drive always likes to mount on either hdb1 or hdb0) as opposed to sda?

In which case your command is still sudo mount /dev/hdb[0 or 1] /some/directory.

If it works you can edit your fstab file to make the mount persistant.
Make a backup.
sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab_backup
Open with gedit.
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab
The final entry should look something like:
/dev/hdb1 /home/karma/some/directory ext3 rw,user,exec,dev,suid 0 2
Copy, Paste, specify your mount point, and specify a different filesystem if other than ext3, you should have an entry for each partition.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the post.


I tried using sda0, sda1, sdb0, and sdb1 all give me the same response:

mount: special device /dev/sda1 does not exist

run fdisk -l command to see what is available. check mount linux command:

______________________
LINUX REGISTERED USER: 455838

We all wish it could be that simple, eh?

If your machine is not giving you an sda# for your partition, there's a problem with the partition. Like LINUX says, what does fdisk -l say? Are you SURE the partition is good? When you put the drive back in the other machine, can it boot?

Here are the contents of fdisk -l

debian:/home/user# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 65 5338 42363373+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 * 5339 9729 35270707+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 1 64 514048+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris


As you can see it is only showing information about my IDE drive and nothing regarding my SATA drive.

In answer to the question regarding whether this HD will boot in a different PC. Yes, it will boot up and run if I place it in another PC, I am beginning to wonder if my SATA ports are working at all on this PC? However, in gnome I did see the HD and the size under the "computer" icon, I just couldn't do anything w/ it.

Hi,
I'm also a noob at this, but I've found the easiest, most consistent way to mount additional drives is to install NTFS-3G. I first discovered it as part of Automatix2 (flame on), and it works well for automatically mounting and write-enabling external drives for me. Might be worth a try.

Thank you for the advise, but isn't NTFS-3G for mounting Windows or NTFS file systems? The file system structure that I am trying to mount is ext3, ext2, and vfat. Will NTFS-3G help me with these?

Also, if I try to mount the drive using gnome by r. clicking on the SATA HD and choosing "mount volume" I get the following error:

libhal-storage.c 1401 : info: called libhal_free_dbus_error but dbuserror was not set.

process 5106: applications must not close shared connections - see dbus_connection_close() docs. this is a bug in the application.

error: device /dev/hda1 is not removable

error: could not execute pmount

Not exactly sure what any of this means?