[spottedhaggis]

For the past 3+ years I have always used the windows version of XBMC, but after a change of hardware, I thought I would help performace by using the Linux build. Installed from the Live disk, it works finr, however, all of the tv programmes, Music, and Movies are on external USB drives. I have 4 x 2 TB drives.

In windows they were no issue, but in Linux all but the Seagate one work,2 x toshiba, 1 x Samsung and 1 x Seagate. No matter what I do the Seagate one never appears on the system.

I noticed the Ununtu build is extremely limited in functionality so I do not see what I can do other than revert back to windows?

[oldtvwatcher]

There is a possibility that the one Seagate drive was formatted differently from the others. My suggestion to you, if you can possibly do it, would be to backup all the media from that drive to another location, then reformat it using the Linux Disk Utility or whatever you have on your system that will format a hard drive. If you are only going to use it under Linux then I would choose EXT4, otherwise if you are going to use it under WIndows and Linux you may want to try NTFS, but I don't think you can format it that way from some Linux distros unless you add some additional software, probably a driver of some kind - search on your version of Linux and "NTFS" to see if you need to install anything additional (or just search on NTFS in your distribution's application center, if it has one). Then once you get it reformatted and know you can access it from Linux, copy your media back.

An alternative would be to try reformatting under Windows as NTFS. Most modern Linux distributions can at least read NTFS drives, but you may or may not need to install additional software to be able to write to NTFS. I don't recommend that unless you really need both Windows and Linux compatibility, and be aware that if it's formatted under Windows you may run into the same problem, so be sure to test it under Linux before you start copying all your files back.

[spottedhaggis]

funny, I decided to do the exact same thing, going to take 15 hours to copy to the other drive, but no worries.