Newbie: Trouble mounting WD External USB drive

Hello,
I just purchased a new Aspire One (16GB SSD/1GB/Linpus/Black) and enjoying it very much.
I have inserted a few usb flash drives and the OS seems to have picked them up without
trouble.

The problem lies when I try to connect my Western Digital (WD) Passport (120 GB
external hard drive) to the usb port. I get an error message stating that the drives cannot
be mounted and an unknown error. However, in My Files section, I can see the drive and
the partitions displayed in the left hand column. The drive has been formatted to NTFS and
has 3 partitions. I have tried using the terminal commands, but, I'm afraid I'm just spinning my wheels.

I would appreciate any help.

Thank you.

 

What is the exact message you get ? That it cannot be mounted or that the system only supports mounting as read-only ?

If the latter, I fear that my solution involving ntfs-config seems to have broken somebody elses system, so I cannot recommend that ...

 

Hello Grim Squeaker,

The exact message I am getting is "Cannot Mount WD Passport (this is the volume's name) - Unknown error".

I have had this drive connected to other PCs (one running Windows and the other Ubuntu) and there doesn't seem to
be any trouble.

Are there specific steps involved in mounting a drive or should the Linpus Lite OS be able to detect the drive and
mount it automatically?

Thanks.

 

Have you installed ntfs-3g?

sudo yum install ntfs-3g

Cheers.

 

rbil,

Yes, I think so.
I tried installing it again and received a message that it was already installed.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

 

Sorry, I don't know what can be going wrong? I don't have any NTFS drives here, but as far as I know, ntfs-3g is supposed to be the driver that allows a Linux box to read and write to NTFS drives.

Cheers.

 

rbil,

after giving up on this for a couple weeks, i tried again by
typing the following on the terminal.

$ sudo yum install fuse fuse-libs ntfs-3g

after a few minutes and messages, i have reached success.
a few points that came handy (but not sure if they are all
necessary) was to have the usb drive connector to the aspire one
and to have network connectivity (i.e. internet) via wired or wireless.

thanks again for your help.
yamzam