External HDD Problems.

I just bought an external HDD enclosure for my 250 GB SATA WD Scorpio 2.5" HDD, but for some reason it wouldn't mount. I had problems prior to this with Fedora, where it wouldn't mount my Ubuntu partition, but after a few reboots, it spontaneously started to work, unfortunately, this is not the case with Ubuntu and this un-formatted HDD. Does anyone know how I can format the HDD and mount it? It installs drivers on Windows Vista, but it won't allow me to format it in the disk manager, and I no longer have the Fedora partition. I really don't want to have to go on the down stairs computer on XP since it has so much virii, and it'd probably take 3 hours or so to format it... which, I just don't want to have to do.
If the worst comes to the worst, I'll have to persuade my brother to let me open up his laptop, and put in my SATA HDD, then boot into G-Parted and get it to format it, but I don't really want to do that, since the battery on his laptop doesn't seem to want to be removed.
I'd do it on mine, but it's IDE and my DVD drive got juice in it...LOL.
Anyway, thanks in advance for any help
Also, I'm running 8.10, and it's an Nexxons enclosure(I believe),
EMZ=]

 

I don't use Ubuntu, so I can't offer any Ubuntu specific advice... but something you could try. ... Assuming this external drive is not listed in your /etc/fstab file, then try the following .... open a gnome-terminal or kde konsole and type the following: su -c 'fdisk -l'
(in Ubuntu you may need to try sudo fdisk -l #or something like that). That will show you what drives your PC recognizes.

If you type next df -h you will see what drives are mounted, and where they are mounted.

Now you need a place to mount this drive. You could create an empty directory under /windows/X (for example). You can do that by: su -c 'mkdir /windows/X' (in Ubuntu you probably use "sudo" instead of "su -c" ).

Then mount the external drive to /windows/X. How to do that? Well, is this drive formated as ntfs or vfat? If vfat, then take a look at the "fdisk -l" command output that you received earlier. Lets say you recognize your external drive as /dev/sdd1

Then in a gnome-terminal or kde-konsole and with root permissions type:

Code:

mount -t vfat -o rw,gid=users,umask=000 /dev/sdd1 /windows/X

... ie as part of that command you may need to type sudo, or first type su, or su -c 'command contents' or what ever method you prefer to use for root permissions.

and you should find the driver under /windows/X

Now if the drive is ntfs, you need both fuse and ntfs-3g installed. I suspect those are installed by default in Ubuntu. In which case you simply need to type:

Code:

mount -t ntfs-3g -o rw,uid=1000,gid=100,umask=0022 /dev/sdd1 /windows/X 

and again you should find the driver under /windows/X

When you are done accessing the drive, type: su -c 'umount /windows/X

Note, if that drive needs a fsck check, you may need to connect it to a windows PC to "clean it first" ... (or alternatively you could ignore fsck errors and force a mount).

There are many other ways to do this ... the above is just one example.

 

'Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table'
It's not actually formatted... is it possible to mount something not formatted, then format it?(I'd like to format it FAT 32)
EMZ=]

 

To format the external drive from Linux, I recommend you take the lazy way out. Download the live CD Parted Magic or the live CD gparted. Burn them on a CD. Boot to either of those, and then use those to format your external hard drive.

I use the YaST tool in openSUSE to do that, and clearly Ubuntu does not have YaST.

 

I did what you recommended, but GParted doesn't recognized the drive at all(I tried several USB ports, and refresed/rescanned the devices several times).
Any other recommendations?
EMZ=P

 

I've done this before with Parted Magic: http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php