Greetings; new member, first post. I am trying to mount a Windows external HD with Ubuntu8. I have researched (Google) for 2 days and keep getting different variations to fix but I am now asking this community for help for what should be a simple procedure. After loading this morning with one command line the HD was recognized but got message "you do not have permissions" which I found is common. Than shortly after, the HD was no longer recognized and received error -71 device not accepting address. Please correct this line in vi /etc/fstab;

/dev/sda1 /media/wd2 vfat auto,rw,users,exec,umask=000

or

/dev/sda1 /media/wd2 vfat umask=000,uid=tom,gid=users 0 0

I am at my wits end. Any help would be appreciated.

Tom

Lets have a look at the bit about the device not accepting the address.

Can we confirm that, when you get this message, that the drive is in fact given the name 'sda1'

After you insert the drive, wait a couple of seconds then run the command:
dmesg tail
It should give you some indication of how the drive is recognised by the kernel and what name it is being given. It will also let you know if there is a problem at the kernel level with the drive.

Also:
What command are you using to mount the drive?
Do you have a line in /etc/fstab for the drive?

The permissions issue can be dealt with by issuing the mount command as sudo.
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/wd2 -o rw,exec,users,umask=000

By rights, Ubuntu (or any other newb-friendly linux workstation) should mount a device automatically when it it is connected, but removable drives are sometimes not dealt with properly.