I'm running Mint, and have an external USB drive plugged in. It is not powered - it gets its power from the mini-PC.
Occasionally I get this message and I've no idea why. It might be after rebooting the machine but I'm not sure (sorry).
The only thing I did with the drive is rename it (to "1tbDrive"). Could that be the problem? (I did that in the Disks application).
Looks like Mint creates a mount point for your drive automatically, similarly to how it treats USB flash drives. If it's something that's always plugged in, you could make an entry into /etc/fstab, just gotta make a directory for it first e.g. mkdir /1tbdrive.
Thank you - that fstab directory doesn't seem to exist in the etc directory. Or maybe I just cannot see it.
I tried but permissions seem to be a problem, even though I'm signed in as the admin user and used sudo. 
Do you know how I can create that directory? Is it these instructions https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-mount-and-unmount-drives-on-linux/ ?
It's a file, you can edit it with vim or nano or whatever text editor you have. The instructions you gave have a section towards the bottom, right before the section on unmounting, but it seems incomplete. Try this:
Make a new directory sudo mkdir /1tbdrive
Use blkid to get the UUID of the device. blkid
Edit the fstab file. sudo nano (or vim or whatever) /etc/fstab
Make a new line at the bottom, in this format:
UUID=(the UUID you got from blkid) [TAB] /1tbdrive [TAB] (the format of the drive, e.g. ext4, btrfs, etc) [TAB] defaults 0 0
The [TAB]s indicate pressing the tab button. After this is done, reboot your computer and you should have your drive mounted automatically.
There is an option for auto mounting a disk, even at boot level. I had this problem before with my backup disk.
You could open the "disk" program, select your disk, use the properties button (cog wheel i believe) go to mount options and there should be two check boxes. One is for this auto mounting at boot level (or something like that) turn that off.
Now this is good advice for normies like me - using the Disks app. Much better than command line stuff. I changed the settings there and hopefully that has sorted it. Thank you!
Hope it helps, would like to know if it was the solution.
Linux does have some amazing and well designed GUI applications. Of course one could do the same in the terminal. It's up to ones preference what to use when.
The people who are into using the CLI have likely already been using Linux for a long time, most of the rest of is who have more recently migrated, or want to migrate want to use the GUI. I am one of the latter :)
Can you share a content of /etc/fstab file? It is the first place I would check in your situation.
Hi, here's the contents (I think! I'm new to linux...)
I get this occasionally. If the directory the drive gets mounted to already exists, it can’t mount it.
Usually this happens if the drive bugs out and improperly dismounts.
Rebooting should get rid of the directory.
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