USB and Portable drives not appearing in Dolphin

[EuroNiceguy]

Hi Again everyone,

I have been scratching my head regarding browsing USB flash and portable Hard drives.

Some flash drives will make themselves known, no problems, but others that had files saved on Mac and Windows won't show in Dolphin or any other File manager.

I have opened up Disk Utility and the drives do appear on there with the option to format - which is what I don't want to as, as I don't want to lose any files.

Can you advise on how any Portable storage drive can appear on Dolphin or any other File manager, and be able to read any format that is on the drives please.



Thank you in advance,
Michael

[claydoh]

Disk Utility

What is that?

Which Kubuntu version?

Open the drive in Partition Manager and see what file system it is formatted with. You likely need to add something that supports that specific filesystem.

For example, Exfat, more common nowadays as normal fat32 only supports file sizes up to 4Gb, may still require exfat-utils on 24.04, and maybe 25.04. I think native support in the kernel is there now, but not sure if these tools are still needed for the OS to be able use them.

But even if it can't access things, Partition Manager will tell you what format is used, and we can go from there.

[EuroNiceguy]

The Kubuntu version is 24.04 LTS

Going into Partition manager, it is coming up as unallocated.

What do you recommend to do, so the computer can read all formats?

[claydoh]

Unallocated means not formatted or assigned to a file system. That is quite different from not supported or can't read.

If these drives have files and can be read in Windows or Mac, you may need to get that information from those.

But let's try one more thing:

in a terminal, enter:

 df -Th

This will show us drive info

Here is mine

$ df -Th
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs          tmpfs     3.1G  5.5M  3.1G   1% /run
efivarfs       efivarfs  150K   78K   68K  54% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
/dev/nvme0n1p2 btrfs     932G  443G  481G  48% /
tmpfs          tmpfs      16G   83M   16G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs          tmpfs     5.0M   28K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs          tmpfs      16G  8.8M   16G   1% /tmp
/dev/nvme0n1p2 btrfs     932G  443G  481G  48% /home
/dev/nvme0n1p1 vfat      300M   12M  289M   4% /boot/efi
tmpfs          tmpfs     3.1G  248K  3.1G   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sdc1      exfat     240G  1.6G  238G   1% /media/claydoh/tsoofs   <----my USB stick
​

Exfat or Fat32 is generally usable on all operating systems, and is perfect for removable media. No permissions or anything to deal with.

NTFS is Ok as well, I assume it works on Mac.

[EuroNiceguy]

Thank you for that,

This is mine;
michael@MichaelDesktop:~$ df -Th
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs tmpfs 2.8G 5.0M 2.8G 1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p2 ext4 458G 95G 340G 22% /
tmpfs tmpfs 14G 8.0K 14G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs tmpfs 5.0M 12K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
efivarfs efivarfs 128K 48K 76K 39% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
tmpfs tmpfs 14G 4.0K 14G 1% /tmp
/dev/sda ext4 1.8T 83G 1.7T 5% /mnt/3cf3cc13-bb6a-4db3-b689-a1a30eef70fd
/dev/nvme0n1p1 vfat 300M 6.2M 294M 3% /boot/efi
tmpfs tmpfs 2.8G 2.6M 2.8G 1% /run/user/1000

[claydoh]

/dev/sda ext4 1.8T 83G 1.7T 5% /mnt/3cf3cc13-bb6a-4db3-b689-a1a30eef70fd

Is that correct? Is this the removable drive of ~~ 2Tb?
it should be /dev/sda{number}. And it is not mounted in a normally used place, either (that itself is not an issue).
But in any case, that is a Linux file system there anyway (ext4)

[EuroNiceguy]

No. That is the second SSD installed in the computer.

The External drive plugged in did not appear on that list

[claydoh]

Sorry, I offered a command that won't show unmounted partitions

lsblk -f is better

[oshunluvr]

Honestly, to me it just sounds like you need to install hfsplus to read the Mac drive(s) and ntfs-3g for the Windows drive(s). Those are not Linux file systems and support for them is not installed by default.

If you are frequently using the same thumb drive with multiple OSs you'd be better off using a file system all of them can read/write like exfat

[Snowhog]

Honestly, to me it just sounds like you need to install hfsplus to read the Mac drive(s)

Is that still relevant? macOS stopped using HFS+ when it was replaced with the Apple File System (APFS), released with macOS High Sierra in 2017.

[oshunluvr]

Is that still relevant? macOS stopped using HFS+ when it was replaced with the Apple File System (APFS), released with macOS High Sierra in 2017.

Probably not. I haven't touched a Mac in 2 decades. A brief web search reveals APFS has little support on Linux. Regardless, my suggestion remains the same: Use a file system that is universally supported.

[Snowhog]

Regardless, my suggestion remains the same: Use a file system that is universally supported.

Totally!

I have access to my mac (running macOS Big Sur (Version 11.7.10), which utilizes APFS) from my Desktop PC (Kubuntu 24.04) via Samba. I can read and write to it.

[EuroNiceguy]

Honestly, to me it just sounds like you need to install hfsplus to read the Mac drive(s) and ntfs-3g for the Windows drive(s). Those are not Linux file systems and support for them is not installed by default.

If you are frequently using the same thumb drive with multiple OSs you'd be better off using a file system all of them can read/write like exfat

Do you have the remote commands to install these?


Thank you everyone for your answers.

[oshunluvr]

The commands to install these packages (and their dependencies) in Konsole or a terminal are the same as you would use to install any package:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install hfsplus ntfs-3g

[EuroNiceguy]

Thank you for this. It did allow access to one of the devices.