Chevalr1c, the external comes with it's own software (of course) called SmartWare. I can't install the drive through that in Ubuntu because it isn't support in Linux (the firmware that is). So I am not sure if I am just an idiot and the drive is there and I am not seeing it, or what haha.
I don't see that being the case unless the software is encrypting the data on the drive, but even still I thought it was the controller that handled that, so that even shouldn't be an issue.
A clean Ubuntu install should detect drive automatically and opening the drive should cause the UI to mount the drive for you. There should be nothing special you need to do to make an external USB drive to work with Ubuntu.
If you have having trouble with it, I can help you try and mount the drive manually through the terminal.
I'm going to use my gateway as an example since it has an extra drive in it for storage. I will write the command as if I were mounting is, but I can't unmount it because it's logging all of my internet traffic to it.
First thing you want to do is find the drive. Pop open a terminal and become root like so:
Once you're root you want to find out which drives are which, so get a list of your drives.
Code:
root@gateway:/# ls /dev/sd*
That will give you something like this:
Code:
/dev/sda /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb /dev/sdb1
Each drive is represented as sdX (unless you're using parallel IDE which uses hdX iirc,). So you can run "fdisk -l /dev/sdX" to find out which drive is what:
Code:
root@gateway:/# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders, total 156301488 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e1c0b
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 1953791 975872 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1953792 5859327 1952768 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 5859328 156301311 75220992 83 Linux
root@gateway:/# fdisk -l /dev/sdb
WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.
Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
80 heads, 63 sectors/track, 387604 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 2048 1953525167 976761560 83 Linux
Lets say that sdb1 was your partition on your 2Tb drive. It's my 1Tb drive in the gateway, but it's a good example.
Say I wanted to mount it to /mnt/storage, first thing is first. I would need to make the directory so I can mount it.
Then, assuming NTFS/FAT on your external drive is /dev/sdb1, you should be able to just mount it using this:
Code:
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/storage
Let us know how that works, but that is how you can manually mount a drive.
Assuming it worked you should see something like this:
Code:
root@gateway:/# mount
/dev/sda3 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755)
none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880)
none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw,noatime)
/dev/sdb1 on /mnt/storage type ext4 (rw,noatime)
The last line is the part saying that mine was mounted. Clearly mine is ext4 and not ntfs or fat but it shouldn't make a difference. I have a 1TD WD MyBook that I could connect to my gateway and even do the entire thing for. It's formatted NTFS too, but it should work out of the box. You should not need to install anything special to access the drive.
