# Getting WD My Book to work on Ubuntu?



## satindemon4u (Apr 8, 2013)

Hey all. Installed Ubuntu yet again and this time I am wanting to use it for basically everything. Problem is, I have a LOT of my stuff on my external HD. So I was wondering if anyone knew exactly how to get the WD "My Book" to work on Linux? Broad question I realize but I can't really find a good guide if one at all, anywhere. Thanks all!

Note: Also posting this on a Linux based help forum so hopefully I get an answer somewhere!


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## CrackerJack (Apr 8, 2013)

Exact Model?


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## Peter1986C (Apr 8, 2013)

That hard drive should work fine with Ubuntu, unless you want to use whatever software they bundle with such drives (but I bet there are alternatives, if so).


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## satindemon4u (Apr 9, 2013)

It's a WD My Book 2TB External HD. Not sure the exact model I guess. 

Chevalr1c, the external comes with it's own software (of course) called SmartWare. I can't install the drive through that in Ubuntu because it isn't support in Linux (the firmware that is). So I am not sure if I am just an idiot and the drive is there and I am not seeing it, or what haha.


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## Peter1986C (Apr 9, 2013)

You should not be needing to install a hard drive, by my knowledge. What filesystem does it have (assuming it is already formatted)? Did you try to mount the drive using the terminal instead (so that we can try to "locate"the issue)?


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## Aquinus (Apr 9, 2013)

satindemon4u said:


> Chevalr1c, the external comes with it's own software (of course) called SmartWare. I can't install the drive through that in Ubuntu because it isn't support in Linux (the firmware that is). So I am not sure if I am just an idiot and the drive is there and I am not seeing it, or what haha.



I don't see that being the case unless the software is encrypting the data on the drive, but even still I thought it was the controller that handled that, so that even shouldn't be an issue.

A clean Ubuntu install should detect drive automatically and opening the drive should cause the UI to mount the drive for you. There should be nothing special you need to do to make an external USB drive to work with Ubuntu.

If you have having trouble with it, I can help you try and mount the drive manually through the terminal.

I'm going to use my gateway as an example since it has an extra drive in it for storage. I will write the command as if I were mounting is, but I can't unmount it because it's logging all of my internet traffic to it.

First thing you want to do is find the drive. Pop open a terminal and become root like so:

```
sudo su -
```

Once you're root you want to find out which drives are which, so get a list of your drives.

```
root@gateway:/# ls /dev/sd*
```

That will give you something like this:

```
/dev/sda  /dev/sda1  /dev/sda2  /dev/sda3  /dev/sdb  /dev/sdb1
```

Each drive is represented as sdX (unless you're using parallel IDE which uses hdX iirc,). So you can run "fdisk -l /dev/sdX" to find out which drive is what:


```
root@gateway:/# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders, total 156301488 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e1c0b

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048     1953791      975872   83  Linux
/dev/sda2         1953792     5859327     1952768   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3         5859328   156301311    75220992   83  Linux
root@gateway:/# fdisk -l /dev/sdb

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
80 heads, 63 sectors/track, 387604 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            2048  1953525167   976761560   83  Linux
```

Lets say that sdb1 was your partition on your 2Tb drive. It's my 1Tb drive in the gateway, but it's a good example.

Say I wanted to mount it to /mnt/storage, first thing is first. I would need to make the directory so I can mount it.

```
mkdir /mnt/storage
```

Then, assuming NTFS/FAT on your external drive is /dev/sdb1, you should be able to just mount it using this:

```
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/storage
```

Let us know how that works, but that is how you can manually mount a drive.

Assuming it worked you should see something like this:

```
root@gateway:/# mount
/dev/sda3 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755)
none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880)
none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw,noatime)
/dev/sdb1 on /mnt/storage type ext4 (rw,noatime)
```

The last line is the part saying that mine was mounted. Clearly mine is ext4 and not ntfs or fat but it shouldn't make a difference. I have a 1TD WD MyBook that I could connect to my gateway and even do the entire thing for. It's formatted NTFS too, but it should work out of the box. You should not need to install anything special to access the drive.


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## alainf (May 15, 2018)

Followed your advice, but I got this : 
mount: unknown filesystem type 'exfat'


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## RadFX (May 15, 2018)

I'm no linux genus.. but I think you are missing a repository. I used https://www.howtogeek.com/235655/how-to-mount-and-use-an-exfat-drive-on-linux/ to mount my exfat drive in Linux Mint.


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## alainf (May 15, 2018)

Followed your advice, but I got this : mount: unknown filesystem type 'exfat'


RadFX said:


> I'm no linux genus.. but I think you are missing a repository. I used https://www.howtogeek.com/235655/how-to-mount-and-use-an-exfat-drive-on-linux/ to mount my exfat drive in Linux Mint.


Superb! It worked. Thank you very much.


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## Athlonite (May 15, 2018)

If you convert it to NTFS instead of exFat  you should no longer have that problem


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## alainf (May 15, 2018)

I have another problem related to the same matter. With above advice, I got the drive up and running the first times. Now that I have copîed a LOT of files to it, and crashed while trashing some files, the drive won't boot anymore. I tried re-doing the above, but to no avail. My WD My Book 4T won't boot anymore. The errror mesage end like this : "ERROR, upcase table is not found". What must I type or do to fix this? I beg someone to help me; the files on this drive are important.


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## Aquinus (May 15, 2018)

alainf said:


> I have another problem related to the same matter. With above advice, I got the drive up and running the first times. Now that I have copîed a LOT of files to it, and crashed while trashing some files, the drive won't boot anymore. I tried re-doing the above, but to no avail. My WD My Book 4T won't boot anymore. The errror mesage end like this : "ERROR, upcase table is not found". What must I type or do to fix this? I beg someone to help me; the files on this drive are important.


Why are you booting from an external drive, do you mean the drive won't mount anymore? If the upcase table is corrupted, you might be in trouble. I don't know how stable the FUSE ExFat driver is but, I find it disturbing that it occurred after deleting files. I would plug the drive into a Windows machine to see if it still works or not. ExFAT support in Linux is pretty immature.


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## alainf (May 15, 2018)

I am not booting from the WD drive. I am booting from my internal drive. But when I plug the WD drive into one of my USB slots, the disk does not mount. I visited "My computer" where the disks at least show up in the list. The WD drive shows up here, seems fine. But if I try to mount it (as a secondary disk), it refuses to. Thanks for responding. I appreciate it.


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## Aquinus (May 15, 2018)

alainf said:


> I am not booting from the WD drive. I am booting from my internal drive. But when I plug the WD drive into one of my USB slots, the disk does not mount. I visited "My computer" where the disks at least show up in the list. The WD drive shows up here, seems fine. But if I try to mount it (as a secondary disk), it refuses to. Thanks for responding. I appreciate it.


So, just as I (and everyone else,) understands correctly: You're saying that it mounts fine in Windows and can be opened and viewed however, when trying to mount the drive in Linux, it is giving you the upcase table error, correct? Out of curiousity, is it giving any other kind of error output, perhaps something like "ERROR: invalid VBR checksum" prior to giving the error you first described?


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## alainf (May 15, 2018)

Sorry. I have not been clear. I don't have Windows, nor Mac ; I have a PC running Debian Linux. No other errors than the one I quoted.

Here is the entire error message (hoping it helps):

Error mounting /dev/sdb1 at /media/alain/BA68-2295:Command-line `mount -t "exfat" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8,namecase=0,errors=remount-ro,umask=0077" "/dev/sdb1" "/media/alain/BA68-2295"' exited with non-zero exit status 1:
stdout: `FUSE exfat 1.1.0
'
stderr: `ERROR: upcase table is not found.


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