External HD wont work :(
Posts: 2
My 40gb external hard drive has stopped working. When i plug it in my laptop it recognises that a mass storage device is connected but cannot access it. it is not showing up in my computer or disk management. It was working fine as i have alot of music and photos stored on it. i tried it in all 4 USB ports on my laptop and tried it on a desktop. please help someone!
Has it got power?
Posts: 1109
Has it got power to it and do you hear the drive spinning up OK? (check power connections to your enclosure).
If so (it's got power), see if the drive is being seen this way:
su
fdisk -l
That should show you any drives and partitions the system sees.
If you've got both a drive and partitions showing for it, it's probably something pretty simple keeping it from mounting.
If you've got a drive shown with no partitions on it, it could be something as simple as a corrupted MBR, and there are some utilities like testdisk that can fix that for you.
Was it making any noise or giving any symptoms that it was about to fail in some way, or any errors that you've seen trying to use it?
See what you get with fdisk -l first (lists your drives and partitions) and copy and paste what you get to a forum post.
Your problem could be almost anything. If the USB enclosure had a failure, you may be able to plug the drive into your motherboard or disk controller card to get it working again (or get another enclosure).
If it's a drive problem (partition table corrupted or worse), it might be fixable. Even if it's not, as long as the drive is visible to the system at all (even if no partitions are visible), you can create an image file of the drive using something like ddrescue (package name gddrescue). It can read drives when most other utilities would fail because of sector errors, etc.
If you use it with a log file, you can even make multiple passes and fill in any gaps in the target image without reading everything it's already copied error free again. For example, make a fast copy to get what you can quickly from a failing drive. Then, make another pass with the retry count on errors set higher. Then, freeze the drive and make a final pass.
Then, you could copy the image file to a new drive if desired (or mount the image file and use recovery utilities to get most of your files back). Photorec can even read the entire drive and recover files when no partitions are visible in many cases. But, if it's a failing drive, your best bet is to get a good image of it as fast as possible. That way, you can work from a copy of the drive versus trying to recover from a failing drive.
The use of it is pretty simple. I can give you the syntax needed to use it if it becomes necessary.
I had to do that not long ago with a badly damaged drive (from impact damage). I just copied the contents of it to a new drive using ddrescue. Then, I used testdisk to recreate the MBR (since the drive geometry was different), and fixed the problems enough with other utilties to get my files back.
I talked someone through doing the same via phone over the weekend, since they had a failed CompactFlash card with wedding photos on it that they were unable to recover.
They installed SimplyMEPIS 6.5.02, and then installed the packages gddrescue and tesdisk (which also includes photorec which can recover over 80 file types now).
Windows could not see the card at all and no recovery programs they tried worked.
SimplyMEPIS couldn't mount the partition on it either.
But, the drive (a CompactFlash card in this case) was still visible to fdisk.
So, we simply created an image file from it using ddrescue (package name gddrescue), using multiple passes with varying retry counts to update the target image as best as possible (it had a component failure of some type and we had a *lot* of errors reading it).
Then, I had them send me the image file via ftp and I copied the image to a new card using ddrescue, created a new MBR using testdisk, and used recovery tools to get some of the files back after that (using both photorec with Linux and PC Inspector Smart Recovery with Windows for that purpose). We managed to recover some of the Wedding photos (.cr2 raw files from a Canon in this case) that were on that failed card.
I've got lots of screen prints from this process, too (I figured that they might come in handy at some point). Most of the time with card failures, it's just a corrupted FAT and you can easily get the files back without this much trouble. But, this one was really messed up. lol
So, don't worry too much yet unless you've heard noises indicative of a head crash.
I'd check the simple stuff first (see if enclosure has power to it, see if the drive is showing up to the system using the fdisk -l command from a console). Then, go from there depending on what you see (let us know what the system is seeing on it).
Jim C.
Do You Have A GParted Live CD?
Posts: 5513
OK Gozzy, you could have a simple problem, a bad problem, or a very bad problem
First, are you running Mepis? If so, what version? Please give us as much information about your system as you can. Did you recently do any type of upgrade to hardware or software?
Next, do you have a spare USB cable (I'm assuming USB and not Firewire) of the same type as the drive is currently using? If so, swap it and see what happens. It's unlikely that the cable's messed up, but this is one way to find out.
Next, have you tried to access this external drive from another computer through the same means? What happens?
If you have a GParted Live CD, it has the ability to see all of the partitions on an external drive (the drive must be plugged in before you boot the computer though). If so, what does it see? What partitions (and types) do you have?
Jon
The ability to comfortably use a computer is directly proportional to desire to listen, learn, and experiment, and is inversely proportional to the fear, anger, and stubbornness that you show.