Error mounting external hdd

A friend of mine, fellow AAO user, has bought the version with linux on.

From the beginning he has trouble using his external harddrives :?:

I have attached a screenshot of the error that occurs when he plugs the drive into the USB. Translation is "Did not succeed in mounting " "." (The drive in question has no name, hence the "s)

 

OK, so what we need is more detail on what is going on when the drive is plugged in. You'll need to do this in the terminal.

First, with nothing plugged in, start the system logger:

Code:

sudo /etc/init.d/rsyslog start

Now plug in the drive. After the error message has come up, see what's in the system log:

Code:

sudo cat /var/log/messages

Copy the output of that command back into a message here, so that we can see what the system is seeing when the drive is plugged in.

Finally, stop the logger again (to save a lot of writes to the SDD):

Code:

sudo /etc/init.d/rsyslog stop

 

Hi David

I am the Linux-challenged friend who made Legion X post in here. Meanwhile I have through 7 hours of googleling solved the problem by using this command:

yum install ntfs-3g

And now it works very well. I'm not sure why, but it works

But thank you very much for your attempt to help

-Jan

 

Looks like the HDD is formatted using NTFS, which is a Windows specific format. Linux can use it, but some Linux installations need an extra tool installing, which is what you've done.

If you'd plugged a disk formatted in one of the standard Linux formats (ext2 or ext3) into a Windows PC, you'd have had the same problem - Windows doesn't read those formats without extra software.

There are some formats which either will use with no extras - FAT32 is probably the most useful one.