External hard drive not recognized?

[KGIII]

Also, I've noticed this with USB devices from time to time. If you've plugged it in and plugged it, or if you've tried numerous operations on it, you have to reboot the whole computer for it to work.

This is a long page that I'm going to link next. It's my 'go to' when you find USB devices that can't be formatted.

Can't format my usb drive. I have already tried with mkdosfs and gparted

I have a MicroSD card in a USB adapter (which plugs into a USB port on my machine, and acts like a USB flash drive). I was using Unetbootin to make this a bootable USB flash drive with Kubuntu. But I

askubuntu.com

There's also a chance that the drive is just plain failing. If it's spinning platter and took a solid whack, that can happen.

 

[sphen]

I have salvaged USB flash drives by wiping the partition data from the drive. All data is utterly lost and unretrievable. This is a fix of last resort. There is no turning back. When you are done, you may be able to use the drive for new data. Can you trust it?

I wipe the USB drive from the Terminal on a Mac. Why Mac? Because that is what I have and use today. I am convinced the same solution will work from Linux.

SEVERE DATA LOSS WARNING:
-> You must be sure of the proper IDENTIFIER for your USB drive. If you make a mistake, you could easily wipe all of the data from your primary drive or another drive. BE VERY CAREFUL!!

dd bs=4096 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/IDENTIFIER

sudo dd bs=4096 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/IDENTIFIER

If you are impatient, you can stop the command with CTRL-C - the partition table is wiped quickly, and wiping the rest of a flash drive is unimportant.

Once the partition table is wiped, I format the USB drive using Mac, Windows, or Linux.
-> Sometimes it helps to format the drive just plain old FAT (MS DOS) with MBR. Once that works, you should be able to format it any way you want.

Mac Only Hints:
Find IDENTIFIER names:

diskutil list

Unmount a drive that you want to wipe. First ask yourself, why is it mounted??? Are you sure you have the correct drive??? ... then ask both questions again ...

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/IDENTIFIER

.

Sorry to be posting a Mac-based solution, but it is what I use that works for me. I am convinced that the same solution works from Linux. I confess that I struggle to figure out which device IDENTIFIER to use with Linux. It is just a web search away.

Note that USB drives can fail in various permanent ways that cannot be recovered. If the USB drive is old and has been used extensively with many writes, it could be "used up" with a unrecoverable failure.

I just looked online, and the price of USB flash drives is so low that recovering one for reuse does not seem worth the hassle or risk to me.

 

[bob466]

OP,

Did you solve your problem...if so let us know...did any advice given help. ?

 

[bennyka]

Were you able to solve the issue? What worked for you? For me, connecting the external drive to another computer was key. This allowed me to determine whether the problem was with the drive itself or my computer. More possible solutions in here - https://www.handyrecovery.com/fix-external-hаrd-drive-not-showing-up/. Good luck!

 

[Trenix25]

You might plug in the drive and use journalctl -xe to see what the system sees. This should tell you that it sees the drive and read the partition table. The fact that it says it can't read the superblock tells you that your system is trying to mount it as a Linux file system rather than a Windows NTFS. Which OS did you say that drive was used with? What does the system journal say when you plug in the drive? If you create a new file system you will lose all of the data that was stored on the previous file system, the one that is there now. If it can't read the partition table either then you might have some bad sectors in some really bad places. If that's the case then the drive has become worthless. If you want to wipe the whole drive and start fresh you can use /usr/bin/dd to do that by reading from /dev/zero and writing to the drive itself. Just make sure you point dd to the correct device when you do so.

Signed,

Matthew Campbell

 

[Monet]

Hello, I just installed Linux Mint 21.1 and I need to transfer files from an external hard drive to the computer itself. However, I cannot mount that drive.
When I plug the drive in, it makes the corresponding sound and it shows on Discs, but doesn't show anywhere else.

I tried the command ls /dev/ | grep sd with the drive unplugged/plugged and it shows up there (sdc), so I'm sure that it plugs in just fine.
But it just isn't there when I try commands like fdisk -l and blkid, nor does it show on GParted.
When I try to mount it, it says "can't read superblock on /dev/sdc".

How can I mount that drive?

That’s when the external hard drive has virus on it or either it’s cracked, might be one of those..

 

[Trenix25]

That’s when the external hard drive has virus on it or either it’s cracked, might be one of those..

I really rather doubt that.

Signed,

Matthew Campbell