External WS backup disk doesn't mount
 

KDE Neon plasma, latest update.
The drive mounts on my Android mobile, mounts on my wife's Apple laptop, but NOT on my HP Probook Laptop.

Any suggestions welcome.

Cheers

Need more data.
Speak of connectivity. Also the file system format, versions of operating system distribution and version.
Speak of the boot log and device recognition.
Speak about what you have tried and what results you received, with detail and verbatim if possible.
Speak also of the hardware.
We cannot troubleshoot in the dark.

External WD backup disk does not mount
 

Sorry, not familliar with the questions, just attached a screen shot with machine details.
I am using a HP Probook Laptop, tried all the 3 USB ports with the same result, unable to mount.
The disk itself is a WD 3TB and mounts OK as mentioned on other devices I have around me.

What is boot log? How do I find out?, what is device recognition?

Hope it helps explain what I am facing

Many thanks

What filesystem?

Most likely either exFAT or NTFS. Look at the output of the command:
lsblk -f

You probably need to install the fuse drivers for exFAT.

System logs are kept in the /var/log directory/folder. One of these logs is boot, which is simply a record of all the messages the kernel put out when last booting the system. This includes a lot of stuff that no one understands ;) but also the kernel's recognition of all the hardware devices. If it has seen your disk drive, it should record its presence with make, size, partitioning and so on.

HP Probook is a series of models that come in two lines that I know about. The Fortis line and the 400 line. Each line has multiple models with slightly different features. I realize now that WE do not know what you have partly because YOU do not know what you have. There are a few ways to look this up. If you have it installed the neofetch utility gives some of the basic information.

I would put this on hold while you investigate the file system, as that is FAR more likely to be the issue.

I look forward to seeing the output of that lsblk command.

The file system of the external WD drive is NTFS

Does this help?
Cheers

Does KDE neon use fuse i.e. ntfs-3g (or just ntfs) or ntfs3 which is the builtin kernel driver (need kernel version 5.15+)?

What happens when you try to manually mount the drive? What is the error or warning messages?

The external WD disk is with NTFS
What is the "lsblk command"? In the setup i see the model is :
HP ProBook 450 15.6 inch G10 Notebook PC

As you can see, I don't know much about all this, I tried to attach the log file, but it doesn't accept it, so i renamed it to .txt, I have no idea what to look for in it.

Thanks

I see only one storage device detected. Was that drive connected during the boot?
You might also try the dmesg command and examine the output for references to /dev/sda or /dev/nvme.


I expect that the issue is that you will have to install or activate one of the NTFS drivers. NTFS is not a native Linux file system, or native to ANY system that is good about sharing information. That is less common these days, because Linux maintainers are good about assuming people might need to access obsolete, faulty, or alien storage like NTFS.

From the boot file (tldr):
So one drive with at least 2 partitions. I assume nvme0n1p1 is the ESP. But this isn't a normal boot log. It's one of those systemd-journald byproducts, so hard for an old woman like me to interpret. I agree that lsblk would give a more reliable answer.

@OP: open a terminal and just type lsblk. Then post the result. But before you do that, you might like to type man lsblk and you will get the user manual entry for the command. Make a point of doing that in future for any command you haven't met before. It's an excellent way of finding out new tricks.

As you have noticed, this site expects attachments to have certain suffixes and that includes .txt for text files, no matter where they come from.

[QUOTE=hazel;6478930]From the boot file (tldr):
So one drive with at least 2 partitions. I assume nvme0n1p1 is the ESP. But this isn't a normal boot log. It's one of those systemd-journald byproducts, so hard for an old woman like me to interpret. I agree that lsblk would give a more reliable answer.

Hello Hazel, I followed your instructions (I know very little about any of that), here is what I got:

It seems the culprit is this line:

What can I do, I have important data that I need to salvage on that disk. It mounts OK on an Apple laptop as well as on my Android tablet and phone, but too large to copy other then to another disk.

I installed NTFS-3G but it doesn't help fix anything

Thanks

What is the error message when you try to manually mount the drive?

Could NOT mount
 

Please see attached

Thanks

From the command line...
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 /mnt/some_directory

You can also try just:
mount -t ntfs /dev/sda2 /mnt/some_directory