External Hard drive mounting issues

[dj_haruko]

I've been searching these forums as to how to mount my external HD, but still can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I am still unable to mount it and read from it.

It's a 120gig Western Digital 7200rpm drive in a BAFO 2010 case that supports both USB and Firewire connectivity. The partition on it uses NTFS, but I'm not interested in writing to it. It's all files from my Windows box that I want to transfer over, so I just need read capabilities.

I know I have NTFS support in my kernal because of the distro of Linux I use (Topologilinux, essentially Slackware 9.1), as well as SCSI support. It appears that all the modules I need are loaded. Here is the output from lsmod:

Module Size Used by Not tainted
raw1394 17460 0 (unused)
usb-storage 65536 0 (unused)
snd-pcm-oss 37252 1
snd-mixer-oss 11992 1 [snd-pcm-oss]
parport_pc 14724 1 (autoclean)
lp 6752 0 (autoclean)
parport 23264 1 (autoclean) [parport_pc lp]
uhci 24496 0 (unused)
ehci-hcd 16872 0 (unused)
usbcore 58400 1 [usb-storage uhci ehci-hcd]
i810_rng 2656 0 (unused)
e1000 62144 1
snd-emu10k1 60212 2
snd-pcm 55904 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-emu10k1]
snd-timer 13252 0 [snd-pcm]
snd-hwdep 4672 0 [snd-emu10k1]
snd-util-mem 1136 0 [snd-emu10k1]
snd-page-alloc 6004 0 [snd-emu10k1 snd-pcm]
snd-rawmidi 12512 0 [snd-emu10k1]
snd-seq-device 3920 0 [snd-emu10k1 snd-rawmidi]
snd-ac97-codec 37240 0 [snd-emu10k1]
snd 27460 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-emu10k1 snd-pcm snd-timer snd-hwdep snd-util-mem snd-rawmidi snd-seq-device snd-ac97-codec]
soundcore 3332 8 [snd]
emu10k1-gp 1352 0 (unused)
gameport 1452 0 [emu10k1-gp]
ohci1394 24200 0 (unused)
ieee1394 42436 0 [raw1394 ohci1394]
3c59x 26832 0
pcmcia_core 40032 0
ide-scsi 9424 0

Whenever I try to do a mount /dev/sda /mnt/external -t ntfs, it says that it isn't a valid block device.

Any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong? I'm still a fresh n00b when it comes to Linux.

[talha999]

try fdisk /dev/hda

then press p

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
dev/hda2 14 26 104422+ 83 Linux
dev/hda3 27 2637 20972857+ 83 Linux
dev/hda4 2638 4865 17896410 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
dev/hda5 2638 4595 15727603+ 83 Linux
dev/hda6 4596 4856 2096451 82 Linux swap

do u see partition there

[dj_haruko]

Yeah, I see the partition for my internal HD, but no other one.

[mrBen]

What do you get in dmesg when you plug the drive in?

Oh, and are you using USB or Firewire?

fdisk /dev/hda won't work because it's looking at the wrong drive ;)

[DMR]

Originally posted by mrBen
fdisk /dev/hda won't work because it's looking at the wrong drive ;) Right. The following syntax will list the partition info for all drives "seen" by the system:

fdisk -l

(the " l " is a lower-case "L")

[Ed L.]

Hi. I was looking for a solution to an almost identical problem when I saw your posts. I have a new SanDisk 256MB USB flash drive tht my home system didn't recognize, but my office box worked with fine first time I inserted the drive.

I had installed a generic USB 2.0 PCI host card on the home system. /sbin/lsusb recognized both the host card and the flash drive just fine. /proc/bus/usb was there with all the expected stuff. But fdisk -l was clueless as to the device file to use. Then inspiration struck...

My home system is an older Tyan Tiger 133D dual processor PIII. I had an Adaptec 2940A SCSI PCI adapter in it left over from a no-longer-functioning HP DAT drive. The machine was not able to reliably boot with both the Adaptec card and USB keyboard support enabled in BIOS, so I (natch) had long ago disabled USB keyboard support....

That was fine back when I needed SCSI and didn't give a hoot in hell about USB, but times are changed, tables turned. So just now I removed the SCSI adapter, enabled USB Keyboard support in Bios, booted up, and fdisk -l (and hardware browser's harddisk menu) both report the flash drive on /dev/sda1, which I then mount (after mkdir /mnt/usb1) as

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb1

and put this entry in /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb1 vfat defaults,users,auto 0 0

you will want to replace vfat with ntfs, and add ,ro to the end of the options list. (You don't want to write to an ntfs partition from linux) If you are using RedHat, you will need to pick up the ntfs kernel module rpm from

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/downloads.html

as RedHat doesn't ship them bundled with their distro's.

(Easy to install, just download the rpm and as root do

rpm -Uvh kernel-ntfs-2.4.20-24.9.i686.rpm

(the numbers in the rpm file will vary to match your kernel version), and you should be in business.