Hard drive problem

[CuzWhyNot]

I'm trying to mount a USB drive on my Raspberry Pi 3 and I'm following to the tutorial at http://raspi.tv/2012/how-to-mount-and-u ... spberry-pi but on the command prompt when I put in

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tail -f /var/log/messages

and I plug in my USB hard drive, it says all the normal stuff but on the sda part it only says

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   sda:

where it should say

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sda:sda1

. Please help. I'm a noob when it comes to Linux.

[epoch1970]

Don't use a five-year-old tutorial on a recent system, unless the author states the guide is still current.

"sda" is a name linux often give to the first serial-ata drive it finds. The next one would be sdb and so on.
"sda1" is the name of the first partition on the first drive. The next one would be sda2 etc.

If your volume is formatted but unpartitioned, which is uncommon yet possible for a data drive, you don't get to see "sda1".
Maybe you want to check how that USB volume?

[k-pi]

If you plug it in after having your RPi booted up, run

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dmesg | tail

that should show you the designation the system has assigned to it.

Then mount it as sudo (or the root user)

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mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

Don't forget to unmount it before removing it, else you could corrupt the filesystem on it.

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umount /mnt

[thagrol]

Could be power related.

Does the external drive have its own PSU or is it powered from the USB bus? If the latter, try putting a powered USB hub between the Pi and the drive.

[CuzWhyNot]

Could be power related.

Does the external drive have its own PSU or is it powered from the USB bus? If the latter, try putting a powered USB hub between the Pi and the drive.

Yes, I'm plugging it into my monitor that is connected to my Pi.

[thagrol]

Could be power related.

Does the external drive have its own PSU or is it powered from the USB bus? If the latter, try putting a powered USB hub between the Pi and the drive.

Yes, I'm plugging it into my monitor that is connected to my Pi.

In no particular order:

• Can you try a different hub?
• Does the drive work as expected when connected to a different computer?
• Has the drive actually been partitioned and formatted yet?
• Is it a 2.5 or 3.5 inch drive?
• Is it a USB 3 drive and USB 3 cable? USB 3 has a higher maximum current than USB 2 so even with a hub (especially if it's a USB 2 hub) you may still not be getting enough power if the cable has a single connector at the host end.
• Are you using a"Y" cable to connect the drive to the monitor?
  If so are you connecting both parts of that to the monitor/hub?
• With the drive connected, what's the output of

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  sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

  If that gives "no such file" try

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  sudo fdisk -l