Howto mount usb drive manually?

lighthouse · #1 1st January 2013, 10:24 AM

Dear,

I plug in my Seagate 320Gb GoFlex USB 3.0 drive in order to store my files and I have a problem - it is not accessible automatically anymore (it was before) and the following command shows the system can not see it:

Quote:

[root@mycomp myself]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000a6b6f

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 1026047 512000 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1026048 625141759 312057856 8e Linux LVM

...
// other partitions

Quote:

tail -f /var/log/messages

shows nothing. gnome-disk-utility too. I'm using Fedora 17, did recently yum update.

When I plug in the drive, the light is on and it produces some sound like if it was checking its files.

All my data (documents, photos) is stored on that drive. I need it back, please help if you can.

---------- Post added at 12:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:44 AM ----------

Under Windows 7 my drive is accessible, just checked now. So the problem is in Fedora 17.

flyingfsck · #2 1st January 2013, 10:29 AM

unplug it
$ dmesg
plug it in
$ dmesg

If you see something like sdb1 then mount it like this:
$ su -
# mkdir /mnt/sdb1
# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1

george_toolan · #3 1st January 2013, 12:16 PM

So what exactly happens when you plug it in?

Code:

tail -f /var/log/messages

If no messages appear after you plug it in then the drive isn't recognized and you cannot use it.

Try to reboot the computer, try a different usb cable and other usb ports.

Also connect the drive directly to the computer and don't use any usb hubs.

To make sure the driver is loaded:

Code:

modprobe usb_storage

lighthouse · #4 2nd January 2013, 09:15 PM

Since in Windows 7 it is fine, I'm copying files there and moving them using another working flash drive. Afterwards I want to format the problematic drive in Windows. I hope it will work in Fedora 17 again. If it will, do you know if it is possible to format disk (drive) in linux and how? I would format it in Fedora 17 to make it native for this system, though I'm a regular user without too much knowledge so my delusions about formatting are simply delusions.

nonamedotc · #5 2nd January 2013, 10:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lighthouse

If it will, do you know if it is possible to format disk (drive) in linux and how? I would format it in Fedora 17 to make it native for this system, though I'm a regular user without too much knowledge so my delusions about formatting are simply delusions.

The Fedora 17 installer will be able to format the disk to ext4 type partition during installation. If you would prefer another tool, there is gparted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net).

You can download the little gparted image (~200 MB), burn it to a CD and partition the hard drive before installing Fedora. Either of these approaches should generally work.

Good luck!

lighthouse · #6 3rd January 2013, 07:14 AM

I need to format external hard drive first and second - I see there is no easy way to simply right click and choose 'Format Disk' like in old bad Windows

Fenrin · #7 3rd January 2013, 09:01 AM

If you want to use the external HD for Windows too, you should better use NTFS as filesystem. Or create several partitions, where all partitions you want to use also with Windows should have NTFS as filesystem. Otherwise ext4 is for Linux systems the most commonly used.

You can use Gparted or gnome-disk-utils to format your hard disk. Gparted is probably a bit more clear and easy to use.

so to install it:

Code:

su
yum install gparted

lighthouse · #8 27th March 2013, 10:49 PM

I used gparted to format my external hard drive in ext4. Now, when I want to copy-past files it says "The folder "Videos" cannot be copied because you do not have permissions to create it in the destination."

Below we can see why (root owns the drive):

Code:

[myself@baikal ~]$ cd /run/media/myself/
[myself@baikal myself]$ ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Mar 27 18:49 SeaGate

How can I fix that and be able to copy my files whenever I plug in my drive?

george_toolan · #9 28th March 2013, 02:56 AM

Try

Code:

chown -R myself.myself SeaGate

marko · #10 28th March 2013, 04:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by george_toolan

Try

Code:

chown -R myself.myself SeaGate

I see a typo there, I think the separator between the user and group is colon :

chown -R myuser:mygroup seagate

REF: "man chown"

Quote:

SYNOPSIS
chown [OPTION]... [OWNER][:[GROUP]] FILE...
chown [OPTION]... --reference=RFILE FILE...

george_toolan · #11 29th March 2013, 09:45 AM

No, it's not a typo ;-)

I'm always using a single dot and it should be working with the Linux version of chown

Code:

drwxr-xr-x. 2 root    root      40 Mar 29 09:42 stunnel

# chown nobody.nobody /var/run/stunnel/

drwxr-xr-x. 2 nobody  nobody    40 Mar 29 09:42 stunnel

Ahmad Samir · #12 29th March 2013, 12:31 PM

From `info coreutils 'chown invocation'`:

Code:

   Some older scripts may still use `.' in place of the `:' separator.
POSIX 1003.1-2001 (*note Standards conformance::) does not require
support for that, but for backward compatibility GNU `chown' supports
`.' so long as no ambiguity results.  New scripts should avoid the use
of `.' because it is not portable, and because it has undesirable
results if the entire OWNER`.'GROUP happens to identify a user whose
name contains `.'.

(personally I've always used : ).