Hi, am new bee to the Linux environment and will love to ask a question.am trying to mount my toshiba external hard drive. 1st I create a directory in the /media directory named toshiba,I now try to mount it and it gives me: can find /dev/ sda/ media/ toshiba in the / etc/ fstab or / etc/ mtab. please what do I do? Thanks brunobrunt.

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Hi, to find out what is the name of your external HDD, type:

sudo fdisk -l

and you'll find your HDD with a name /dev/sdb1 or something like that. To mount it:

mount /dev/sdb1 /media/toshiba

to unmount it use:

umount /media/toshiba

Hi, we'll I have tried it again and it keeps telling me can't find /dev/sda1/ media/toshiba in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab.can someone help me. Thanks.

Can you please post the output of sudo fdisk -l, the command(copy&paste please) that you type to mount your HDD and finally your fstab file.

One doesn't mount 'hard drive' but rather filesystems. In addition to the output requested above, what filesystem do you have on the drive? Strange that it would be sda/sda1 which would generally refer to the first hard drive rather than a secondary/external drive.

You must be careful to type a space between /dev/sda and /media/toshiba. Otherwise, the mount command assumes
that you are trying to mount the device /dev/sda/media/toshiba and searches for the mount point for that device in /etc/fstab. The error message simply indicates that the search has failed.

Besides that problem, for Linux /dev/sda is the whole device, partition tables included. You generally mount a partition such as /dev/sda1 (in an unpartitioned disk, there is no other partition. A partitioned disk will have
other partitions /dev/sda2 etc...). So the correct command is mount /dev/sda1 /media/toshiba.

Please look at the online documentation of mount and fstab by typing man mount and man fstab.
You can also read the documentation of filesystems in Linux System Administrator Guide.

fstab and mounting were among the more difficult concepts for me to understand when I started with Linux.

You need to know how the system is seeing the partition you wish to mount; the fdisk -l command mentioned above will tell you that. Then you need a mount point, which you already have created. Then you need to string them together properly. You may also need additional arguments, depending on what you need to accomplish.

Here is the best fstab tutorial I have found (though it stops short of UUIDs). It should help a lot with those concepts.

http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

(When I tested this post, the link above was having issues, so here's a link to another excellent article).

Here's a bit from my /etc/fstab for mounting a partition on my external HDD. The first line, the one that's remarked out, shows the entry I used to have. The second line shows the entry as I edited it to use the UUID (when I'm doing this sort of editing, I keep the old entry in case I mess up the new one):

What 0S are you running?
What fs type?
Is it windows, linux or mac?
Have you checked dmesg to see what is registering there?
Also if is an external drive it would probably show up as usb0 if it is the only usb device plugged in.