Noob problem : can't mount external hdd

[Akujin]

Hello there,

I've been looking through the man page of mount and a few threads before that, but I did not find any solutions to my problem, which follows :

I just bought a 120 go Samsung usb hdd, and Gentoo does not seem to be able to recognize it. It's NTFS, and XP finds it without any problem. I've tried fdisk -l, it does not appear.

what I did until now is mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/removable
The answer I get is :

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

I hope you'll be able to help me, and sorry if the solution is obvious

Thx

Aku

[Juan Pablo]

You need the ntfs file system enabled in your kernel as a module or built-in. However you won't be able to write to it.

You can install ntfs-3g for full write support

emerge -av fuse
emerge -av ntfs-3g
modprobe fuse
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/removable

With this I assume you have some decent USE flags in /etc/make.conf

If you are new to Linux, you shouldn't be using Gentoo, it's a distro for experienced users.

[Akujin]

The ntfs was not enabled but now it is and it's still not working. By the way, I saw that there was a write option for ntfs in the kernel. So maybe I won't need ntfs-3g. But that's not really the problem right now : I still can't see my hdd.

I add here the result to dmesg | tail :

# dmesg | tail
sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x10070000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0
SQUASHFS error: sb_bread failed reading block 0x0
SQUASHFS error: unable to read superblock
NTFS driver 2.1.27 [Flags: R/O MODULE].
sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x10070000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0
printk: 75 messages suppressed.
NTFS-fs error (device sda): read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Unable to read primary boot sector.
NTFS-fs error (device sda): read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Mount option errors=recover not used. Aborting without trying to recover.

And yes, I am new to Linux, but I did not really choose Gentoo, some informatician friends of mine put it on my computer when I asked for a nice Linux But I like challenges, so I'll try to go on with it for a while.

thx for your help

Aku