Mounting a USB hard drive

English Hardware
#1

Attempting to mount a 1TB “SimpleDrive” USB drive. The USB management tool shows the drive, however selecting the option “open with file manager” has Dolphin opening /home/user/Documents versus /media/simpledrive.

The partitioner shows that the drive is not set to any mount point. I attempted to edit the drive settings by creating a mount point at /media/simpledrive. The partitioner tool fails with the following message:

Failure occurred during the following action:
Mounting /dev/sdc1 to /media/simpledrive

System error code was: -3003

…

Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Chose on action:

1: If you have Windows, then disconnect the external device …
2: If you don’t have Windows, then you you can use the ‘force’ option for your own responsibility. …(shows a command to disconnect device)

Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:
/dev/sdc2 /media/simpledrife ntfs-3g force 0 0

I chose to abort. Any help would be appreciated.

OS is a midstream upgrade of SuSE 11.1. 32 bit AMD CPU.

#2

If you have been using it windows go back there and do safely remove
Then boot back to Linux and try again

#3

This USB drive appears to be non-functional until it is formated. I opened it on Windows, executed the startup menu, and it indicated that the drive needed to be formated. After formating, the drive works as expected. I wonder if I could have performed the initial format in Linux.

Thank you for your help.

#4

If NTFS, then it needs to be formatted under Windows.

#5

This USB drive appears to be non-functional until it is formated. I opened it on Windows, executed the startup menu, and it indicated that the drive needed to be formated. After formating, the drive works as expected. I wonder if I could have performed the initial format in Linux.

Further to ken-yaps point regarding NTFS format, in general you can list the device with

fdisk -l

then create a file system with mkfs command. Refer man mkfs for more info. For example, to configure sdb1 partition with vfat format:

mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdb1

Interestingly, I found mkfs.ntfs is available as an option:

dhcppc6:/home/dean # mkfs
mkfs mkfs.ext2 mkfs.msdos mkfs.vfat
mkfs.bfs mkfs.ext3 mkfs.ntfs
mkfs.cramfs mkfs.minix mkfs.reiserfs

#6

I was having trouble also, it was saying did not reconize file system. I went into YAST and ran the partitioner and then plugged the drive in and had it do a re-scan. It then reconized it and all is good now
Hope this helps
:wink: