[Roger D]

Hi

I've got a unbuntu 6.06 installation, on the whole it's just excellent. However, I've run into the following problem:

I've got a Western Digital My Book external hard drive. Up to now, it automatically appears on the desktop whenever I switch on. Suddenly it's stopped doing this.

When I click on Places>computer, I see the My Book icon complete with the Gnome footprint icon (not sure if there's any significance in the icon). When I right click on 'open', I get the message: 'Uanble to mount the selected volume'. 'Show more details' gets me:

error: directory/media/mybook not empty
error: could not execute pmount.

I know the drive is still working, as it's OK in Windows.

It looks as though I've failed to unmount the drive at some stage, but when I look in /media, this is what I get:

roger@roger-desktop:~$ cd /media
roger@roger-desktop:/media$ ls
cdrom cdrom0 hda1 My My Book
roger@roger-desktop:/media$

Which suggests My Book is indeed mounted - it's in dark blue, just like hda1. I'm a bit puzzled by the My (in black text) in front of My Book. It's a file, but what it's doing I just don't know.

I thought it might be worth trying to umount My Book, but this is what I get:

roger@roger-desktop:~$ cd /media
roger@roger-desktop:/media$ ls
cdrom cdrom0 hda1 My My Book
roger@roger-desktop:/media$ sudo umount "My Book"
umount: My Book: not mounted
roger@roger-desktop:/media$

Which, to me, is totally weird - one minute my system is saying a drive is mounted (probably); the next it's saying it isn't.

I'm not sure if it's relevant, but this is my fstab file:

/etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 / reiserfs notail 0 1
/dev/hda1 /media/hda1 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

I'm pretty much a Linux beginner, but out there I'm sure there's a Linux expert for whom these message all make perfect sense. I'd love to hear from them

Regards

Roger D

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Try doing a "df" to see what is mounted, I suspect it is not mounted though.

It looks like Ubuntu does an additional check to make sure that the mount point directory is empty, which is nice in a way, but also annoying :-). Go to the directory and type "ls -A". That lists the hidden files, except "." and "..", the "-a" option would list those, but those directories are always there, so what is the point.

[Kemasa]

Try doing a "df" to see what is mounted, I suspect it is not mounted though.

It looks like Ubuntu does an additional check to make sure that the mount point directory is empty, which is nice in a way, but also annoying :-). Go to the directory and type "ls -A". That lists the hidden files, except "." and "..", the "-a" option would list those, but those directories are always there, so what is the point.

[Roger D]

HI thanks for the response, but what's a "df"

[Kemasa]

Type "man df" at a command window:

df - report filesystem disk space usage