Problem with detecting external hard drive

**jamesgiles** · May 7th, 2010

Hi,

I have Ubuntu Studio, and I have all my music on an external hard drive. However i cannot get linux to recognise it. I have searched for advice on the internet but as I am new to Linux I quite easily get lost in all the terminal commands.

Is there any chance someone could give me some help, perhaps walk me through how to mount an external hard drive.

The drive is 400 GB, and i believe is FAT32. It's USB.

cheers

JG

**jamesgiles** · May 8th, 2010

Can anyone give me some advice on this?

Cheers

**arvindbis** · October 19th, 2011

hey i think you it is ntfs drive as fat32 doesn't support this much larger dirve!! do cross check!
well if it is fat32 and connection is USB then it should be auto detected!!
Even i'm new to linux but have some knowledge of devices .

regards

**collisionystm** · October 19th, 2011

You can format a drive that large with FAT32. I have a 1tb drive at home I formatted with FAT32 using a method I found. I did it so I can use it with PS3.

@OP

Open terminal

type

fdisk -l

post the output please

**dargaud** · October 19th, 2011

Code:

sudo fdisk -l

as without 'sudo' the command will not return anything. So what's the output. And the last few lines of 'dmesg' a few seconds after you plug the drive in ? And 'mount' ?