I am not a complete linux noob but I don't know a lot either and would greatly appreciate some help with this. I just installed Ubuntu 10.10 onto my laptop. Everything is working great however USB devices such as thumb drives and external hard drives wont show up. I have been looking around a bit and when I run sudo fdisk -l it displays this: Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00065684 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 29255 234983424 83 Linux /dev/sda2 29255 30402 9212929 5 Extended /dev/sda5 29255 30402 9212928 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/sdb: 16.0 GB, 16026435072 bytes 64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15283 cylinders Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000df90d Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 1 15283 15649776 7 HPFS/NTFS It does seem to display my 16 gig thumb drive but other then seeing it here I cant access it to read and write files to it. It does the same with my external hard drive. I know those devices work as I have tried them on my other computer and they are working fine. Also this is what is in fstab if this will help anybody help me: proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 /dev/sdb1 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 /dev/sdb5 none swap sw 0 0 Thank you very much for the help everyone.