External hard drive won't mount

Question

Since plugging the hard drive in didn't automatically make a window pop up I decided to manually mount the hard drive in Disk Utility. It gives me this:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 1: helper failed with:
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sdb1 is already mounted on /
mount failed

Could this have been caused by leaving the hard drive plugged in when shutting down?

/etc/mtab:

/dev/sdb1 / ext4 rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0 0 0
proc /proc proc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
none /sys sysfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw 0 0
none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw 0 0
none /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw 0 0
none /dev devtmpfs rw,mode=0755 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0
none /var/run tmpfs rw,nosuid,mode=0755 0 0
none /var/lock tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
none /lib/init/rw tmpfs rw,nosuid,mode=0755 0 0
binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/matthew/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,user=matthew 0 0

/etc/fstab:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
# for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
# devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
/dev/sda1       /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=3b0db205-2bdb-4c98-a506-6bdd3520d540 none            swap    sw              0       0

Solution 1

here is ubuntu help page for mounting usb drives. I have an external hardrive which has 2 ntfs and 1 ext3 partition I have entered the configuration on /etc/fstab so that it mounts on boot time. You can do this if you do not usually move your external drive. There is another mounting utility for automount, you can install it with

sudo apt-get install usbmount

Solution 2

If you don't have a lot of data on your disk I might just format/partition it and then set up a new directory to mount it to using terminal. Then you could either manually mount it or have it automatically mounted on start up. This page will show you how to format/partition and mount.

Comments

[Michael Gundlach]

Could you please show us the contents of your /etc/mtab and /etc/fstab?

[LassePoulsen]

And /proc/mounts as i shows what is currently mounted.

[RPG Master]

Sorry... Here you go.