USB hard drive, pretty much.

So I've tried to get my external hard drive to work in Ubuntu and I keep failing miserably. I've tried to connect it automatically and manually and it won't work (Parallels does disconnect it from mac, but it never shows up on linux). Any ideas? (Sorry if this has been asked before.)

 

Does the drive light come on or flicker at all after Parallels takes it away from OS X?