If he's using the Live version, it would be slightly different (and pretty tedious unfortunately but after it's done, it works like a charm). I had a similar problem and what I had to do was go into the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + F2)... Then, enter:
That should generate a list so that you can see what the machine is calling your external drive (mine was sdb1). We'll assume yours is also sdb1 and that it's a NTFS drive and you want to have the files from the drive show up in a folder called myfiles. So, go ahead and enter:
Code:
mkdir myfiles
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 myfiles
If you want to call the folder something different or if your external drive was located somewhere else or wasn't NTFS, you would obviously edit that to your liking. Now, what you'll need to do is enter:
Code:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Go to the end of that file and create a line that only says:
Code:
/dev/sdb1 /home/user/myfiles ntfs-3g defaults 0 0
Change the user portion to whatever your XBMC username is and alter the other details to what we did above as well. At that point, you can press CTRL-X to save and exit. Now, to finish it up, you'll need to enter:
And, you should be good to go. You can check to make sure it works from the terminal by typing:
And, seeing if the files on your drive show up. Or you can go back into XBMC Live (Ctrl+Alt+F7) and check from there. If it's working, try restarting and making it sure it's still working on reboot. If so, you should be good to go from there.