[GLLUG] Trouble Accessing external UDB hard drives from Western Digital

[Marr]

On Friday 14 October 2011 09:27:56 dburk at ws6transam.org wrote:
> Good Morning,
> First post to the list.

Hi Dan,

That's a doozy of a first post! ;^)  Welcome to Linux!

Personally, I'd forget about the auto-mount issue until you can be sure the 
disk is manually mountable and what filesystem (if any) is on the drive. (Walk 
before we run.)

You already know that the drive is 'dev/sdb[1]'. Aside: If you're comfortable 
with the command-line and its utilities, this is something you can also 
discover with an 'fdisk -l' command to list all devices. But be _very_ careful 
with 'fdisk' commands (usually used to manipulate the partition table, 
possibly corrupting a drive if you get careless!) -- that's an 'ell' not a 
'one'!

If the device exists and has a valid filesystem, it should be mount-able (as 
'root' user, of course):

   mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

If that fails, try it without the "1". This will attempt to mount a drive 
without partitions but with a filesystem (rarer, but possible):

   mount /dev/sdb /mnt

If that fails, I suspect there is no filesystem on the drive and you'll need to 
cross that bridge next.

If either of those 'mount' commands _succeeds_, you should be able to 
determine the filesystem used on the drive like this:

   df -hT

That's a 'disk-freespace' command, with the 'h'uman-readable and 'T'ype of 
filesystem options.

If these are new drives, they might have no filesystem at all, in which case 
you'll want to format the drive(s). If they already have a filesystem (like 
NTFS), you'll probably still want to re-format them. By the way, I agree with 
the others who suggest use of a filesystem besides NTFS. I cannot recall the 
size limitations (e.g. 2TB?) of the various filesystems, but it might need 
consideration too.

If you cannot get things working, please be sure to share the output of 
any/all of these commands with the folks on this list in your next post.

Hope this helps a bit, initially....

Regards,
Bill Marr