How do i mount an USB HDD?

RealElwood · Post by **RealElwood** » 12 May 2008, 03:25

I found it strange that there was no how-to how to do this. I'm sitting at work atm and at home my bubba has a HDD plugged into the USB port.

How can i gain access to the HDD, I'm all new to Linux so an how-to would be of much appreciation, i would want it to be visible in the filemanager as "USB".

The HDD is an 320Gb SATA disc enclosed in a cabinett with a USB interface running NTFS.

Regards
Mathias

RealElwood · Post by **RealElwood** » 13 May 2008, 07:48

Eek · Post by **Eek** » 13 May 2008, 11:45

Hi
ntfs is not my preferred choice for a filesystem to use with linux.
If it is empty, maybe better to format it to ext3.

anyway you should probably be able to mount it using:

Code: Select all

$ su -
$ mkdir /mnt/USB
$ chmod 777 /mnt/USB
$ mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/USB

Now the usb device should be usable under /mnt/USB.

If this doesn't work, please give the output of:

Code: Select all

fdisk -l /dev/sda

cheers
Eek

RealElwood · Post by **RealElwood** » 13 May 2008, 15:13

I couldn't get it to work, see picture.

Reason for keeping the disk NTFS is that it's going to be used both for linux and windows machines.

carl · Post by **carl** » 13 May 2008, 20:23

RealElwood wrote:I couldn't get it to work, see picture.

Reason for keeping the disk NTFS is that it's going to be used both for linux and windows machines.

To use mount to mount an ntfs filesystem, the kernel must have that support activated. An alternative is to use http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsmount

Post by **DanielM** » 14 May 2008, 02:09

RealElwood wrote:Reason for keeping the disk NTFS is that it's going to be used both for linux and windows machines.

The preferred file system in this case would be FAT32 in my opinion. FAT32 works quite well in both Windows and Linux...

/Daniel

Eek · Post by **Eek** » 14 May 2008, 06:38

This is a good idea,
but then you have a file limit of 4Gb

Post by **DanielM** » 14 May 2008, 07:22

Eek wrote:This is a good idea,
but then you have a file limit of 4Gb

Hmmm... I'm not certain of this, but isn't this only a limit in the formatting tool of Windows? If I'm not remembering wrong here there are tools that can format bigger partitions. Or maybe if the drive is formatted from the Bubba?

/Daniel

ps. Sorry for the vague speculations here. Much work and no play makes Daniel a dull boy. ds.

Eek · Post by **Eek** » 14 May 2008, 08:02

Hi
I don't mean the drive size
but the file size.
cheers
Eek

GettinSadda · Post by **GettinSadda** » 16 May 2008, 06:14

Well, FAT32 is limited to 32-bit file sizes (so max filesize ~4GB).

The correlation of 32-bit filesize limit and FAT32 name is chance.

Edit: Why not try FUSE and NTFS-3G?

Cheeseboy · Post by **Cheeseboy** » 17 May 2008, 11:43

There is another problem with FAT32 on USB disks.
Windows will not accept a disk larger than 32 GB (in my experience)....

EDIT:
This is from wikipedia on FAT32:
Windows 2000 and Windows XP can read and write to FAT32 file systems of any size, but the format program included in Windows 2000 and higher can only create FAT32 file systems of 32 GiB or less. This limitation is by design and according to Microsoft was imposed because many tasks on a very large FAT32 file system become slow and inefficient.[12][16] This limitation can be bypassed by using third-party formatting utilities

However, I have found it impossible to mount large (200+ GB) harddrives with FAT32 filesystems on Windows XP...