An attempt to mount a USB disk drive device fails on Red Hat

After plugging in the USB drive run fdisk -l as follows.

fdisk -l

Part of the output from this output is shown below.

Disk /dev/sdd: 499.4 GB, 499405291520 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60715 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd1               1       60716   487699456    7  HPFS/NTFS

 Disk /dev/dm-11: 499.4 GB, 499405291520 bytes
 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60715 cylinders
 Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
  /dev/dm-11             1       60716   487699456    7  HPFS/NTFS

The device ID for the USB drive is /dev/sdd1

However when trying to mount /dev/sdd1 onto /mnt

mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt

the following error occurs.

mount: /dev/sdd1 already mounted or /mnt busy

As can be seen from the output of fdisk -l above the device mapper subsystem is interfering with this device and preventing us from manually mounting it.

However check the contents of /etc/fstab for a line similar to the following.

/dev/sdd1               /media/My_Passport      ntfs    pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0

If this line exists for the USB device (in this case /dev/sdd1) then use the following command to mount /dev/sdd1 on /media/My_Passport.

mount /dev/sdd1

However unless additional packages are installed linux will only be able to read from this USB device and not write to it.

This is because the USB device contains an NTFS filesystem and therefore RedHat mounts it read only. Attempting to mount the device read write does not solve the problem.

The installation of packages fuse and ntfs-3g should solve the problem.