Linux Mint Forums

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.

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

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.

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: 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!

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.

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

Husse wrote: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.