Western Digital Essential Edition 1 TB External Hard Drive in Debian 5.0

I installed Debian 5.0 last night. When I tried to copy my music and pictures from my Western Digital Essential Edition 1 TB External Hard Drive to the newly installed machine, it failed me.

The "My Book" name did show at the left tree panel of the file browser. But when I clicked on it, a dialog window prompted up showing that the mounting failed because of invalid parameter.

The external drive's lights were on. But as they were not blinking, I knew that Debian was not reading the external disk. Whatever, I was not sure about the reason of the failure. At first I thought maybe debian didn't support external usb disk as large as 1 TB. Then I searched on line, but got little userful information. Thinking the guide came with the disk may help a little, I took out the disk's package box. To my surprise, I found "Compatibility: Windows Vista/XP/2000; Mac OS X 10.3+" on the box. Debian was not supported, and I never noticed this before!

However, there is always hope. When I just was hesitating whether to switch back to Windows or not, I found this post "Mounting an NTFS drive in Debian". Following the instruction I installed two packages libfuse2 and ntfs-3g with the following commands executed in the terminal.

apt-get install libfuse2
apt-get install ntfs-3g

Guess what, it worked. Now "My Book" was mounted successfully. After all, the problem lied on the two packages.