[NTLUG:Discuss] USB hard drive will not mount in openSUSE 11,0

[Leroy Tennison]

Jeanne Smith wrote:
> 
> Hello All,
> My husband and I are tent-making missionaries living in Europe. Since my German is not so good I thought I might need a english LUG and since I lived 23 yrs in Dallas I decided I might understand Texan better then German at the moment.
> 
> I am a little lost. Last month my laptop was fried by an electrical problem in our flat. I could not afford a new one and someone gave me an old desktop without a OS. I decided having been Windoz based all my life to try Linux. I got a magazine that had the disk for OpenSUSE 11 with all the instructions in it.T
> The biggest challenge is that I can not write to my external USB harddrive. First of all I did not know I had to "mount" it. So I plugged it in and I believe the first time it automounted. Then I unplugged it to use it with another computer (I had no idea I had to unmount it) and when I plugged it back in I could only read the files. I could not save new files. When I try to save it either says KDE media manager is not on OR it crashes. I somehow managed to find KDE media manager and enable it, but now it says "mount:only root can mount /dev/sdb1/ on /media/IOMEGA_HDD.
> 
> I also have many other small problems with software like Kaffiene that I do not have any idea how to resolve.
> 
> I don't know enough about Linux to know how to troubleshoot it. Can anyone help a blonde thats new at Linux? Or maybe blondes should not play with Linux ;-)
> 
> P.S. Please DON'T tell me to read the help files. If I had not ALREADY done that I would not be posting!
> 
> Blessings,
> Jeanne Smith
> ===================
> www.healingcommunities.org
> 
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A couple of ways to do this:

Open a terminal (click the SuSE icon, select "Run command", type konsole
into the data entry box and click Run), type

su -

supply the root password (the prompt should now end in a # sign), type

mount /dev/mount /dev/sdb1/  /media/IOMEGA_HDD

If you get an error about IOMEGA_HDD not existing then

cd /media
mkdir IOMEGA_HDD

and try the mount again.

The other way would be to edit /etc/fstab and add a line

/dev/sdb1/  /media/IOMEGA_HDD   auto  user

before doing the above read 'man fstab' and 'man mount' to understand
what all that means.