Maxtor 1.5tb drive not usable in Ubuntu 8.04

arunpmohan · 01-27-2009, 02:32 AM

Hi

I have a maxtor 1.5tb drive which i want to use with ubuntu 8.04.I can see the drive detected but on clicking the drive it gives error like "Couldnot mount volume".

I use vista as well and it works well there.But i need it to work with Ubuntu as well.Any help is appreciated.

Thanks in advance
Arun Mohan

shuuhen · 01-27-2009, 04:06 AM

What format is the drive?

The output from dmesg | tail (run in a terminal) might help too.

radi0j0hn · 01-28-2009, 12:27 PM

I dual boot Vista and Ubuntu.

I've noticed "unmountable" devices that I had just used on a Windows machine and did not close properly. Have you used the T1.5 drive on a Windows platform? If so, you might try plugging it back in and either closing it, ejecting if (if possible) or shutting down the machine. It seems to me that some "unfinished business" from Windows prevents the device from being mounted on Ubuntu.

**Done_Fishin** · 01-31-2009, 10:50 AM

Normally, if you want to share a drive or partition between Windows & Ubuntu it would need to be formatted in FAT32
Ubuntu will not usually recognise an NTFS style volume without additional software and then it would normally be read only .. you would not be able to write to it

I would suggest that you download, burn and run Gparted Live CD to resize your 1,5T Drive and give yourself an extra FAT32 partition which will be mountable under Linux and you will see under Vista .. take care about the partition size though since FAT32 will not support large drives in the same way that Vista does .. you may have a 137GB ceiling

according to this site though

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

Quote:

FAT32

In order to overcome the volume size limit of FAT16, while still allowing DOS real mode code to handle the format without unnecessarily reducing the available conventional memory, Microsoft implemented a newer generation of FAT, known as FAT32, with cluster values held in a 32-bit field, of which 28 bits are used to hold the cluster number, for a maximum of approximately 268 million (228) clusters. This allows for drive sizes of up to 8 tebibytes with 32KB clusters, but the boot sector uses a 32-bit field for the sector count, limiting volume size to 2 TiB on a hard disk with 512 byte sectors.

01-27-2009, 02:32 AM	#1 (permalink)
arunpmohan Registered User Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 1 OS: Ubuntu 8.04	Maxtor 1.5tb drive not usable in Ubuntu 8.04 Hi I have a maxtor 1.5tb drive which i want to use with ubuntu 8.04.I can see the drive detected but on clicking the drive it gives error like "Couldnot mount volume". I use vista as well and it works well there.But i need it to work with Ubuntu as well.Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance Arun Mohan

01-27-2009, 04:06 AM	#2 (permalink)
shuuhen Manager Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Colorado Posts: 1,019 OS: Gentoo Linux, Mac OS X 10.6.2, FreeBSD 6.0 My System	Re: Maxtor 1.5tb drive not usable in Ubuntu 8.04 What format is the drive? The output from dmesg \| tail (run in a terminal) might help too. __________________ Has it been a few days since I replied to your thread? Don't panic! I'm a busy college student and may forget a post if I'm extra busy (or it might just take me a while to be able to do a decent reply). If you still need help and are awaiting my reply after a few days, PM me about it. When posting what errors you get, please give the full message. It makes helping you much easier.

01-28-2009, 12:27 PM	#3 (permalink)
radi0j0hn Registered User Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: MN/WI/IA border Posts: 13 OS: Vista/Ubuntu/XP	Re: Maxtor 1.5tb drive not usable in Ubuntu 8.04 I dual boot Vista and Ubuntu. I've noticed "unmountable" devices that I had just used on a Windows machine and did not close properly. Have you used the T1.5 drive on a Windows platform? If so, you might try plugging it back in and either closing it, ejecting if (if possible) or shutting down the machine. It seems to me that some "unfinished business" from Windows prevents the device from being mounted on Ubuntu.