Ubuntu won't mount second HDD or Flash Drives

[Evil Queen]

BUT, my USB keyboard and mouse work just fine. Just my accessories won't work.

Just before I left Houston, the SO shut down the computer for me and took out the smaller HDD (I still have a 320 and a 750) since it was his and held a bunch of his stuff.

I put the computer back together in the living room last night (now in New Mexico) and no matter what I do, I can't get the computer to mount my bigger HDD (the 750 is my media drive, it has all my music, books, TV shows, movies and Rosetta Stone on it).

Here's the funny thing; it only does this on Ubuntu Linux.

It loads up just fine on Windows (I have Windows XP Essentials).

Help me out; I have a skin to make Windows look like LInux, but it's so freaking slow and doesn't like to load stuff. Which is why I never use it unless I have to.

I want my movies back!

[SteeleDragon78]

does it give a specific error message aside from unable to mount drive? i was helping a friend whos main drive wouldnt mount for backups, i later found that it had to be checked several times with chkdsk before it would mount, other than that im stumped.

[Evil Queen]

It says I don't have the privilege and that's it. I've tried manually mounting the darned thing through the Storage Manager but still nothing!

I can manually go into the folder as well but it doesn't show anything! It says "0 items, Free Space 208.8 GB). Which is weird since it's a 750. So my files are there, just not reading them.

[SteeleDragon78]

is the 750 formatted for ntfs? and do you have the nfts plugin, i think its available from the add/remove app manager, that may help, but im not sure....maybe pederson can help more....

[Evil Queen]

It should be. Worked just fine for nearly a year until now. I figured something burped when the SO took the other HDD out.

Oh Pedersen! Can I borrow you for a moment for 30?!

[ferebee]

Maybe try checking if the uuid of the disk changed? That happens to me sometimes if I install another distro on one of my other partitions - Ubuntu sometimes won't recognize the partition with the new distro.

This link from the ubuntu forums explains how (post #3) - you might need to edit your fstab file if the uuid has changed.

Not sure about why the flash drives wouldn't be mounting though.

[Hibble]

Ok am i correct in thinking that your pc had 2 internal HD's or to be more precise had 2 internal hd's when you installed ubuntu. e.g /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. You then removed sdb and replaced it with a different one.

Did the old HD auto start when you log in to ubuntu.(8.10?) If it did then you probably have the uuid problem mentioned in the post ubove. open /etc/fstab

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

You should see each partition to be mounted on startup in the format /dev/sda"x" where x is the partition number. e.g sda4 if your media hard disk is just one partition its likely sdb1

Delete the uuid and replace it with the /dve/sdbx number you find in the line above marked with a #

The modified line should now look like

/dev/sdb"x"    /"location it used to be mounted"    ext3      defaults      0       1

Save your changes and reboot.

[Pedersen]

You guys were close. EQ and I got me to remote into her computer. The drives had been reordered when the one drive was removed. sdb became sda. The end result was a fairly simple fix. I modified /etc/fstab, and (as a paranoia check) we rebooted. Things are back to normal for her.

[Evil Queen]

And she's very very very happy!

*hands over cookies to all who helped*