# External USB hard drive mounting problems

## Tuxenstein

I was recently gifted a 1TB external hard drive which has been partitioned into one FAT32 partition and one NTFS partition (not my choice in either file system or how it was partitioned, but also I was warned there was a chance it may void the warranty to change this or I could just leave it as one big NTFS partition instead--I chose to leave it alone). 

For the first few times, I had no problems with mounting/unmounting it logged in as a user (and it automounted).

Then a few days ago, when I tried to unmount it, I got error messages from Gnome complaining that supposedly the device was busy and it was waiting for something to finish writing to the drive--however, there was absolutely no actual activity on the drive (earlier when I had mounted it that session it had attempted to run some Windows program that came on the drive to access the documentation and registration, etc. which resides on the FAT32 partition)--which, when prompted about the program, I told it not to (this was the first time it ever came up since I've had the drive). I assumed it did not run as I then received an error message involving dbus and issues with recognizing the drive (?). However, the drive appeared to be mounted normally and I had complete access to it). Every time, it's only the FAT32 partition that has been mounted--not the NTFS partition.

Then I attempted to umount it through the command line and received that same type of error message (ie the dbus issue) except mentioning hal. It would not let me unmount it either time.

Periodically, it would also launch into one of two pop-up error messages involving dbus. The first would read that it couldn't unmount the drive because either the request timed out or the network was unreachable or the device was busy (?). This was then followed by a more persistant (and regular) error message complaining that dbus supposedly could not locate the drive.

I was finally able to unmount it in the command line while logged in as root. 

After that incident, I received an error message when Gnome attempted to automount it again involving dbus and it refused to mount.

Since then, I have not been able to mount the drive through even the command line, at least, logged into a user account--but dmesg definitely is showing the drive and I was able to manually mount/unmount the partition I needed when logged in as root.

However, as I primarily need access to it while logged into my user account, this has proven to be a problem for me as I can see what's on the drive (the FAT32 partition), but I can't actually write to it. None of my other USB devices (including thumb drives and a portable MP3 player) has caused me any issues--I still have full access to them. It's just this external hard drive I appear to be having this problem with.

I do have ntfs3g installed (and have tried to install it with and without the suid use flag--currently, it is with that use flag) and had tried removing it at one point to somehow see if that may perhaps help (it didn't, of course). 

So, while I recognize that there must be a permissions issue in this somewhere, I'm at a loss as to how to resolve this. The external hard drive is also a device I don't plan on or do keep constantly plugged into this one system, so there does need to be some way of unmounting it while still in Gentoo.

Any ideas on what may be going on and how to fix this will be appreciated. Thanks!   :Smile: 

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## honp

I wont`t advice you anything. I only want to say that i don`t like dbus and hal and when i read your post my blood warmed up again... Good old mount command.

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## Tuxenstein

I'm actually used to mounting things more through the command line. However, in this situation, I can't even do that while logged in as a user with this drive--I can only do so logged in as root.

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## honp

So if you can mount it by hand, you can put "user" option to fstab.

Else you can use sudo for mount /dev/xxx /mnt/xxx

or (and this is probably the best way) set the ownership and rights in /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules file.

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## b0nafide

If automount used to work with your USB drive and automount still works with other USB devices, I'm thinking that your external USB HD FAT32 partition may have filesystem errors. Have you tried unmounting the drive and running fsck.vfat as root?

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## Tuxenstein

Sorry, as I meant to reply to this sooner.   :Embarassed: 

I actually have tried that with fsk, and nothing.

Also, in between the time I posted asking for help on this and sometime within the last month, I had a period of where the FAT32 partition was mounting as it normally should be and had access to it (however, possibly due to Hal.d or who knows why, once I unmounted it--which always had to be done manually for some reason (not that I'm complaining as I'm used to it)--I couldn't remount it again, unless it was as root unless I rebooted).

That period ended sometime last month and has gone back to both partitions drawing complaints and my being unable to mount even the FAT32 partition as anything but root.

I can't explain nor understand why it went from having problems to not having problems to back to having problems again.

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