Seagate Freeagent drive won't mount - SOLVED

[redseventyseven]

Hi,

My external hard drive (Seagate Freeagent) doesn't mount in Mint Daryna XFCE CE (beta 008).

It worked fine in the regular (Gnome) edition (after the tweaks shown here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494673) but in XFCE it simply doesn't show up anywhere, not even in my fstab file when I plug it in.

I have a USB flash drive which works exactly as it should (shows up when plugged in, files all accessible) but that uses a FAT file system. The Freeagent drive is NTFS based, but I have all the ntfs-3g packages installed. I'm at a bit of a loss for what to try next. Is it a known bug with the Beta edition, or am I missing something?

Can anyone help?
Thanks.

[Husse]

doesn't show up anywhere, not even in my fstab file when I plug it in.

fstab does not change automagically - that's mtab. Look in /etc/mtab when the disk is connected
Also make a line in fstab like this
/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 ntfs defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
(Provided you use ntfs)
I can't understand why it shows up in gnome but not in xfce

[merlwiz79]

Are you dual booting with windows?
Sometimes mine won't show because windows didn't unmount it correctly.
If you type sudo mount /dev/sdXX replacing sdXX with what your drive is normally in Gnome.
Example: mine is sdc1 so I use sudo mount /dev/sdc1
It will most likely come up with an error and you can then post it here.

[redseventyseven]

Are you dual booting with windows?
Sometimes mine won't show because windows didn't unmount it correctly.

No. It seems to be a slightly random problem, and not just specific to Linux Mint XFCE.
Eventually I found the drive using fdisk -l (which is what I meant to say instead of fstab - whoops!). Once it showed up using that command it was a case of editing fstab manually (as per Husse's instructions) using this guide to help: http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

The line I added was slightly different:

Code: Select all

/dev/sdb1 /media/FreeAgent\040Drive ntfs user,auto,exec,rw 0 0

In this case the "\040" represents a space character.

I also had to create the directory "/media/FreeAgent Drive" manually on the system.
After mounting the drive, I could access the drive through the file system at that point, but there was no convenient little icon on the desktop.
A couple of reboots later, however, and the icon finally materialised, and now it appears to have "stuck".

The moral of this story - the behaviour of these drives is really erratic, sometimes it works automatically with no trouble at all, and sometimes it needs a lot of manual configuration and persuasion. But stick at it - eventually it will work!

[redseventyseven]

Actually that's not quite the end of the story. I then needed to configure my USB drive manually in the same way as for the FreeAgent drive - by creating an entry in fstab and creating a folder in /media/ by hand. I have a feeling I might have to do that now for every other storage device that gets attached, as the automatic and manual configurations get in each other's way.

[Husse]

Part of the explanation lies here

Code: Select all

/dev/sdb1 /media/FreeAgent\040Drive ntfs user,auto,exec,rw 0 0

In this case the "\040" represents a space character.

White space in a folder name gives problems and if for some reason you have to use that name not, say, freeag, then you have to "tinker" a bit

[redseventyseven]

Part of the explanation lies here

Code: Select all

/dev/sdb1 /media/FreeAgent\040Drive ntfs user,auto,exec,rw 0 0

In this case the "\040" represents a space character.

White space in a folder name gives problems and if for some reason you have to use that name not, say, freeag, then you have to "tinker" a bit

This suggestion has really helped. Thanks!
Also, installing a "mount devices" item to my xfce panel has really helped me monitor the situation.