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I am having difficulties with mounting an external 750 GB HDD on my toshiba satellite laptop. I am currently running Ubuntu OS, 14.04, 64-bit. Since I bought an SSD, I was thinking of using my old HDD as an external disk for backup. The first time I mounted the old HDD, everything ran just fine. The second time, the following problem occurred:

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Every time I try to mount my backup, only a 255MB file system partition mounts, while 750GB storage remains invisible and I just can't figure out why that happens. I checked on google for some solutions like How to mount an external HDD?, but it didn't help. Then I checked whether my old HDD somehow got broken by placing it back in my laptop. But it turned out it was as good as new. Any ideas?

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Juraj Kasac
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  • You might have to manually mount it using mkdir /media/drive; mount /dev/sdb4 /media/drive (replace /dev/sdb4 with the partition's correct path) – Daniel Oct 15 '15 at 18:47
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    What are the partition layout and the file systems on the drive? Either a screenshot of Gnome Disks or GParted or the output of sudo lsblk -f will do. – David Foerster Oct 15 '15 at 23:22

2 Answers2

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Search your partition with this command:

sudo fdisk -l

After that mount your partition with:

sudo mount /dev/sdXN /mountFolder

Where X is de letter of the device and N de number of partition. If you need more help please share de output of "fdisk -l".

ftpfly
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I can confirm that external multi-partitioned disks sometime do not mount automatically in Ubuntu 14.04 (randomly). It normally works better if the partition has a label --- but it's not foolproof. So I suggest the following thing:

  1. Connect the disk. Look in /var/log/syslog for the device the disk has been assigned; for example in my case if I put the disk on I have:

    [...]
Oct 15 22:30:01 samsung-romano kernel: [30078.860813] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
Oct 15 22:30:01 samsung-romano kernel: [30078.861675] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Oct 15 22:30:01 samsung-romano kernel: [30078.922933]  sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 < sdb5 sdb6 >
[...]

    so the disk is /dev/sdb. I know that the data partition (was /home before) is the /dev/sdb6 one.

  2. put a label on it (umount the partition if needed). You can use gparted or manually; for example, if it's an ext[234] partition, you can use

    sudo tune2fs -L oldshome /dev/sdb6

  3. eject and reconnect the disk. Most of the time, the disk will be automatically mounted on /media/YOURUSER/oldshome.

  4. if not mounted, you can manually mount it with 

    udisksctl mount --block-device /dev/sdb6

    which has the same effect of an automount (no sudo needed, and it will be mounted in the same place as above).

Notice: I think this is a kind of bug/misbehavior of the udisk2 helper. Sometime if is doing the opposite thing, and it don't let you "eject" the disk, remounting the partition as soon as you click on "safely remove drive" and you need to umount it manually. But it's random, so I never managed to collect enough data for a bug report.

Rmano
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