Help for usb disk and usb pendrive

[Nils Kassube]

Valter Mura wrote:
> $LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
> Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Operazione non supportata
> Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:
> Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
> clicking on the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the Windows
> taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.
> Choice 2: If you don't have Windows then you can use the 'force' option
> for your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:
> mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/disk1 -o force
> Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:
> /dev/sda1 /media/disk1 ntfs-3g defaults,force 0 0
> ***
>
> I CANNOT use the choice one.

Why not? Don't you have Windows any more? Then you should better use ext3 
instead of NTFS. Using NTFS is only useful if you want to use that disk 
with Windows as well.

> My fstab file is:
[...]
> /dev/sda1 /media/disk1 auto users,atime,noauto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0 ***
>
> Note that I have already installed "ntfs-3g" and "ntfs-config", so I
> supposed I could use the hard disk.
>
> Do I have to *substitute* the last line in fstab file with
> */dev/sda1 /media/disk1 ntfs-3g defaults,force 0 0* or only add it to
> the file?

If you only want to read your data once to copy them to another drive and 
then reformat the external disk with ext3, then don't use fstab but 
manually mount the drive with the force option. However if you really 
want to keep the NTFS file system, replacing the fstab line might help. 
But I think you would also need the noauto option for an external drive. 
And pay attention to the warning above which said "you can use 
the 'force' option for your own responsibility" - it is there for a 
reason.

> Another issue: now the system isn't able to mount and read/write also
> usb pendrives, and before Kubuntu recognised my pen drives. Why?
> Perhaps some conflict? Do I need to configure the fstab, adding a
> customized line for the usb hard disk? Or for the usb pendrive, which,
> I suppose, should be "seen" by the system automatically?

The pendrive probably uses FAT32, I'm not sure the atime option is 
supported by FAT32. Why did you use that atime option anyway for all your 
entries? It is at least useless for the cdrom entries.

Another reason might be that the pendrive uses /dev/sda1 if the external 
drive is not connected. Then I think the fstab entry prevents 
automounting the pendrive.

> The only solution I know presently, as I'm not very skilled with the OS
> and the Konsole, is to reset everything and reinstall Kubuntu in the
> internal hard disk, which is dedicated to Linux, than indipendent from
> Windows.

Reinstalling probably doesn't help. The problem with the external drive 
doesn't go away by reinstalling. Maybe you could automount the pendrive 
again, but that is probably possible if you delete the fstab entry 
for /dev/sda1. I suggest you better stop playing with your fstab and use 
the default.


Nils