How do i mount my external drive

I have a sony vaio drive which has stopped working on my Imac

The message I get reads

NTFS-3G could not mount /dev/disk1s1 at /volumes/60GB EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE

because the following problem occured

(Dollar sign)LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0) Failed to mount '/dev/disk1s1': Operation not supported Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action

Choice 1 is windows so I will not put it here

Choice 2 : If you do not have windows then you can use the 'force' option for your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/disk1s1 /volumes/60Gb EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE -o force

or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/disk1s1 /volumes/60GB EXTERNAL FARD DRIVE ntfs-3g force 0 0

I have tried the first option in the command line and still no joy, how do i do the second option, where is the etc/fstab file and how do i insert the line

Thanks Jim

Can you try plugging the drive into a Windows machine and then "safely eject" the drive?

It sounds like there may be some corruption on the drive itself, so when the Mac OS X system tries to mount it, it thinks the drive is already in use.

Maybe if you plug it into a Windows machine (since it is using NTFS) and safely eject it, it'll fix whatever is corrupted?

My God you are a genius...

Took about 10 seconds in total to fix that problem...

I feel quite stupid now......

Thankyou for your help...

Jim

We here at MF do what we can. Don't be a stranger.

I won't..
I only got my imac 4 weeks ago, I love it..

Have always been a PC user before, never go back now...

Same problem... need a different solution?

So, I have the same problem/error message, but safely removing it from my windows side (my mbp is split) and restarting still got me the same error message??

I had the same problem and used another PC to:
1. Plug in the external HD to the PC
2. "safely remove hardware" - note, apparently you cannot do that while you have a windows explorer session running, so close that.
3. Plugged in the external HD to Mac

And all ok now.

(I am using MacFUSE 2.0.3.)