Fujitsu external hardrive wont mount on Linux Mint Gloria

[LieutenantMushu]

Hi!

I've just recently purchased a new external hardrive to file away about 100GB of video and mp3 files, but I can't get it to mount on my Linux OS.

Can anyone help me?

[Rubberman]

How are you trying to mount it? And what file system is installed on it? A lot of these large external drives these days are configured with NTFS to work with Windows, or else they are formatted with FAT32 file systems. NTFS drives will not automount on Linux - you will need to mount it manually.

[LieutenantMushu]

Hi there! (sorry it's taken so long to reply, everything has been breaking on me D: )

I've been trying to mount it using the terminal. I've found numerous help topics on the subject but nothing seems to work. It's an NTFS drive, and I have been trying to mount it manually.

Anything you could suggest to help me would be awesome.

Thanks

[Rubberman]

Depending upon the distribution+version of Linux you are running, you might need to install the 3g-ntfs file system support. Look for /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g or /usr/bin/ntfs-3g - on my system /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g is a link to /usr/bin/ntfs-3g.

[LieutenantMushu]

I tried typing that in to Terminal but it wasn't working. It says:

ntfs-3g: No device is specified.
Please type '/sbin/mount.ntfs-3g --help' for more information.

then I used then help option and it says:

ntfs-3g 1.2506 external FUSE 27 - Third Generation NTFS Driver

Copyright (C) 2006-2008 Szabolcs Szakacsits
Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Yura Pakhuchiy

Usage: ntfs-3g <device|image_file> <mount_point> [-o option[,...]]

Options: ro (read-only mount), force, remove_hiberfile, locale=,
uid=, gid=, umask=, fmask=, dmask=, streams_interface=,
syncio.
Please see the details in the manual.

Example: ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/win -o force



I'm a complete newbie when it comes to Linux :C

[Rubberman]

This means that you have ntfs-3g installed on your system - goodness so far. I will give you the steps you need to take to get this mounted on your system, but first I need to know if you will want to use this drive with Windows, or is it going to be Linux only? If Linux only then we will first reformat it with an ext3 file system. If you are going to want to access the data you store on it from a Windows system as well, then we'll keep the NTFS file system.

But first, I need to know what the output from "fdisk -l" is. You need to execute this as root.

[LieutenantMushu]

Riiiiiight!

So I did that fdisk -l thing, and this came up:

Cannot open /dev/sda
Cannot open /dev/sdb

I'm assuming I didn't do it as root, but I have no idea how to do that.

Also, I will be using this external HDD primarily with a Windows OS.

[Rubberman]

Ok. So we still need to get the information from fdisk, but we won't be reformatting the drive. What distribution+version of Linux are you using - such as Fedora Core 11 (FC11), Ubuntu 9.04, etc? Also, do you know how to log in as root?

[LieutenantMushu]

I'm using Linux Mint 6 Felicia - Main Edition, if I'm not mistaken. And no, I don't know how to log in as root. I thought I was always logged in as root because I'm the only user. D:

[Rubberman]

One presumes that you do have a user name + password to login with?