Can't mount my external hard drive

Hi

A newbie question here. I have a Samsung SATA USB hard drive, but when I plug it into my new Acer Aspire One, a window pops up that says: Failed to mount "External_HD". Unknown Error.

I followed a few instructions that I found on the web, involving going to /mnt and so on, but I have no idea why the hard drive is not mounting.

I bought this brand new external hard drive specially to use to transfer files between my Aspire One and my bigger laptop, so I am going to be bummed out if it doesn't work. I was under the impression that Linux supports nearly all external hard drives -- so why is this not working?

Please help, thanks.

 

Hi euj,

Strange, I use Maxell without issues plug in and its picked up. did the HD come pre formated to NTFS or Fat32?

Also is it found by your other laptop?
Have you installed ntfs-3g?

Sorry for all the questions, but maybe this

sudo mount “then your drive info here”

You should then be asked for a password

 

Yes, my other laptop picks it up.

I tried typing fdisk -l into a terminal (following instructions that I found on another forum). Discovered that the external drive is called sdb1, and it is HPFS/NTFS formatted.

I apparently do have ntfs-3g installed. Well, at least I went into Add/Remove Software and something with ntfs-3g in its filename was ticked, which presumably means that it's installed?

Also found this webpage that seems to deal with a similar problem.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/redhat-l ... 02565.html
But it's all gibberish to me. I think I need to install something called a kernel driver? Is that the same as ntfs-3g? or something else completely? (Whatever the case, I haven't yet managed to successfully figure out how to install from source code -- have tried a few times, but have no idea what is going on. And now I'm paranoid that the machine seems to be slowing down because of all my attempts to attack it with bits of code copied from forums that I absolutely don't understand, oh dear...)

I also tried following the instructions on this webpage:
http://www.jarrodgoddard.com/linux-web- ... e-in-linux
Nothing seems to have happened and I have no idea what I did.

 

P.S. I tried typing sudo mount into the terminal. This is what I got:

[root@localhost user]# sudo mount sdb1
mount: can't find sdb1 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab
[root@localhost user]# sudo mount extdrive
mount: can't find extdrive in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

(i also tried 'sudo mount extdrive' because I think I renamed sdb1 as extdrive at some point. Or maybe not. Who knows. Not me.)

 

Hi euj,

Are you saying it is a duel file system on this drive? :shock:

HPFS maintains the directory organization of FAT, but adds automatic sorting of the directory based on filenames. Filenames are extended to up to 254 double byte characters. And as far as I know HPFS is only supported under Windows NT versions 3.1, 3.5, and 3.51. Windows NT 4.0 cannot access HPFS partitions.

Do you not have a choice to format the drive? If so choose NTFS as NTFS is a recoverable file system because it keeps track of transactions against the file system, and works fine with 99% of OS including Linux and the Acer. Do you have instructions with it, that detail initializing, partitioning and formatting?

As I do not believe this to be a Linux or Acer issue more setting up the drive correctly so it can be read and written to, hence the unknown error it can`t identify the file system.

 

Thanks Barrie.
Unfortunately formatting didn't seem to work :cry: (I plugged the hard drive back into my Windows laptop and formatted the whole thing, specifying NTFS. But when that was done, the Acer still refused to mount the drive. Same message as before: Failed to mount "External_HD". Unknown error.

This is what I get from typing fdisk -l into a terminal:

I interpreted the last line to mean that the hard drive is HPFS/NTFS. Is dual HPFS/NTFS considered weird?

The hard drive still seems to work fine with my Windows laptop.

The instruction sheet that came with it is a tiny piece of paper that says "Refer to your operatiing system manual or system manual for partitioning and formatting. But in the FAQ section, there is something that is possibly relevant: it says the drive may not be recognized if there is insufficient DC power , in which case, supply subsidy DC power (but that doesn't make sense because it is a 2.5 drive with no DC outlet). Any chance that the Acer Aspire One is not supplying enough power to it via USB?

 

P.S. Not sure if I'm on the right track, but I found a thread on an old Ubuntu forum that seems to describe my problem almost exactly (all other things being equal):
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubunt ... 43658.html
My 'fdisk -l' output is similar, and I get similar outputs when I type in 'mount' or 'sudo mount /mnt/sata', etc. Plus the problem in this old forum thread seems to be that SATA drives that show HPFS/NTFS formatting refuse to mount, whereas IDE drives mount fine. Mine appears to be a SATA drive that is dual formatted in HPFS/NTFS.
Don't know... maybe I am barking up the wrong tree.
Or maybe i just happened to buy a HDD that happens to be in the 1% of HDDs that is not supported by Linux.... argh. Sigh.

 

Hi euj,

I still feel that the issue is the duel file system, personally I always stay with a NTFS file system.

Regarding the power issue there is both a solution and the Symptoms would be a little different, usually if the external HD is not receiving enough power absolutely nothing happens no error messages or anything.

Many manufacturers have got round this problem by supplying a duel power / data USB cable as follows.

1.USB power.
2.USB data + power

Normally you would just plug in the USB data + power cable, but if this was not sufficient to power up the HD then you would plug in the other USB plug that was just power.

Personally as this is a new unit I would take it back to the shop and ask for a credit note or swap for a pre formatted NTFS drive, as you could spend a lot of time trying to unsuccessfully find a solution for this SATA, and at the end of the day you want something that is plug and play as well as interchangeable for many OS`s.

Here is an example of one of my Maxtor NTFS drives.

 

Thanks, Barrie. Unfortunately I can't return it because I bought it on eBay.

I continued to mess about with the Linux code in the terminal, and now the error message has changed: it says

To make matters worse, I've just tried out one of my USB flash drives on the AA1 for the first time, and it comes up with the same error message. The other flash drive works fine, and both work fine on my Windows machine.

(Perhaps I should have bought a Windows AA1 instead. I am getting increasingly exasperated, and really don't have the time to be doing all of this annoying stuff! Sigh. )

Can anyone help? How do I grant mounting privileges to the user, rather than just to the root? Seems like the AAI is interpreting both my external HD and my flash drive as something called 'sdb1', which only the user can mount?

 

Hi
I also have the same problem using a Western Digital My Book.
"Failed to Mount 'My Book' "
The whole thing is NTFS (I think!)
I know it's not a solution but at least you know you're not on your own :?