2

I have an external hard drive of Linux. How do I see the files from Ubuntu system? I also need to transfer these files to MAC system from Ubuntu system.

SurvivalMachine
  • 2,783
rajesh chilukuri
  • 21
  • 2
    Simply connect the drive and click its icon in your file manager, e.g. nautilus or dolphin, they should automatically mount it. – Hi-Angel Nov 17 '17 at 19:02
  • If transferring to Mac, you may have to format the drive on the Mac. Pretty sure Mac doesn't read ext drives, but Linux reads some/most (all?) Mac formatted drives. Web-search to find which format is best for your situation. – GlenPeterson Nov 17 '17 at 19:07
  • If it doesn't appear in File Manager when you plug the drive in, that's going to be a lot more difficult. Could be a bad cable, no power, unreadable file system... lots of things. – GlenPeterson Nov 17 '17 at 19:08

2 Answers2

4

Normally, provided the drive is not encrypted and connected via USB, you plug it in and enjoy (On Linux). Macos cannot read regular Linux file systems.

If it is a SATA drive (connected via SATA in e.g. a tower), you would have to mount it.

You normally mount (make accessible) a hard drive by issuing the following command on the command line:

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

That command is assuming you have but two SATA drives (CD-ROM/DVD/BlueRay, Hard drive) in your system and /mnt is not used for mounting anything else (you would know). To access it, you access /mnt. If you have three, e.g. two hard drives and an optical disk (CD/DVD/BR), it would be mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt).

SATA devices live in /dev/sd<some_letter> and usually have one or more partitions /dev/sd<some_letter><some_number>. So, /dev/sdb1 translates to the first partition of the second drive.

To get a list of all hard drives and partitions, you issue fdisk -l on the command line.

If it is SATA and encrypted, you would have to use the tools of program you used to encrypt it to mount it.

thecarpy
  • 383
  • 4
  • 12
0

It's actually quite simple, after you know how, that is:

sudo fdisk -l

will list all available drives and partitions. Find the drive/partition you want to mount, and run:

sudo mkdir /mnt/disk
sudo mount /dev/(insert disk/partition here) /mnt/disk
user8292439
  • 3,808
  • Will it keep this mount (And name) after a reboot? For example if I have a Docker image where I want to save data to that external drive, can I then config /mnt/disk and expect it to work after a reboot – Mech0z Mar 24 '18 at 14:46