You once mentioned the same issue when you tried Ubuntu: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2034
Did you solve it eventually for Ubuntu and/or did you apply the solution on Mint?

No, that was another issue. The OS didn't operate smoothly, audio was not working and I couldn't get 16:9 resolution. For that I never got the help I needed, thus I was never able to solve it. That's why I installed Mint 9 - and because I didn't want to install the recommended Ubuntu server edition.

But strangely enough, the connected HDD did work there, at least initially or sometimes.

I could say that I still have sort of the latter issue, as downloading is more often that not stalling and very often even appears to be freezing or blocked, and the downloaded videos aren't played smoothly, but seem to kind of jumping occasionally. Whether the latter is caused by stalling during the download, or because I wasn't able to do the two BIOS updates, I can only wonder.

As I'm still struggling with this issue, I tried again the following previously recommended commands with the following output, which is now different from before:

With "sudo fdisk -l" the HDD connected via USB is listed as "/dev/sdb".

"mount /dev/sdb/mnt/usbdisk"
"mount: can't find /dev/sdb/mnt/usbdisk in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab"

"/mnt/usbdisk"
"bash: /mnt/usbdisk: No such file or directory"

"umount /mnt/usbdisk"
"umount: /mnt/usbdisk is not mounted (according to mtab)"

Please inform me in case this makes any difference for solving this problem.