External Hard Drive help for a newb?

[Adriel]

I just bought a netbook yesterday that uses Gos (using it right now). I have never used Linux before in my entire life.

I have an external hard drive, 400 gigs. I bought it from a friend, so I have practically no information about it, but it says "Seagate" on it, if that helps in any way. I've been using it on a pc for a year now, so I know it works fine.

I would like to use this drive on my netbook. I tried to hook it up, and nothing happened. I found the usb drive in the computer files, and tried to open it, but it said "unable to mount." Can I use my harddrive on Gos, and if so, how?

[Rubberman]

Do you know if the drive is formatted for NTFS or FAT as the file system? I'm not familiar with Gos, though it is possible that it doesn't deal well with NTFS drives. FAT drives should be ok, though. The default format for most of Seagate's consumer drives is FAT-32. Every Linux version that I am aware of handles FAT-32 file systems just fine. The other possibility is that you need to be root to mount the drive.

[Jonathan183]

Try opening a terminal ... with the external drive connected enter the following

sudo fdisk -l

if that does not work try

su -
fdisk -l

in both cases the -l has a small L not a one. Post the output here - we should be able to see the disk partition structure ... also post the output of

mount

[Sunnyside]

Seagate drives for years now have been formatted NTFS by default. Because you mentioned you found the drive in the computer files means the operating system can access it, probably only in read only mode, to write to it you would need to install an application/utility called ntfs-3g. But the big issue right now is that the OS sees it, but won't let you access it.
Look through administrative tasks or similar (user accounts, priveleges) in menus, you may need to give your user permission to mount external drives.
You may be allowed to do it from command line by first finding what device it is by running the commands Jonathan183 suggested. Then you need to make a directory to mount it to and run a special mount command.

[Rubberman]

Seagate drives for years now have been formatted NTFS by default. Because you mentioned you found the drive in the computer files means the operating system can access it, probably only in read only mode, to write to it you would need to install an application/utility called ntfs-3g. But the big issue right now is that the OS sees it, but won't let you access it.
Look through administrative tasks or similar (user accounts, priveleges) in menus, you may need to give your user permission to mount external drives.
You may be allowed to do it from command line by first finding what device it is by running the commands Jonathan183 suggested. Then you need to make a directory to mount it to and run a special mount command.

Good suggestions. If only there was some way to aggregate the best advice from all the posters to these forums, call it the linuxforums.com robo advisor!

[Jonathan183]

If you post the output of the commands as indicated then we will know:-

• partition structure for the disk
• which disk partitions are already mounted and where they are mounted to

We can then advise if you need to mount the partition or point you to the folder the partition is mounted to ...