Solved External USB drive not detected in Linux MX

[Erik Groothuijzen]

I have recently installed Linux MX on my Lenovo W530 due to certain issues between my machine and Mint. MX has solved all of these issues, but now it won't detect one of my USB drives. Because of a small SSD (240G) internal drive, I move all my data to external drives regularly. I use different drives for different data like working files, photos, movies and backup. All these drives work seamlessly with various different file formats like NTFS and Fat 32 and also seamlessly between my Linux machine and my wife's Windows 10 machine, except one drive.
It is a Seagate 1TB drive with NTFS file system for backups. When I put it in the Linux PC absolutely nothing happens. The disk manager does not pick it up either. In the Windows 10 PC, no problems. What could the possible cause be, because I don't want to loose the data, and the Widows 10 machine will also have to migrate eventually?

 

[bob466]

Didn't you say...everything is working fine with MX...might be time to try another Distro.

 

[Erik Groothuijzen]

Didn't you say...everything is working fine with MX...might be time to try another Distro. View attachment 21196

I did say that everything was working fine, i.o.w. everything I had issues with, with Mint. All my hard drives work except this one. I am trying to understand why and if I can fix it without loosing the hard drive or the data. If you can advise another Distro, please tell me as the number selections is just too great to be able to make a sensible selection having come from a lifetime use of Windows. Still like Windows but not Window 11 or being forced into buying a new laptop, which I can't afford anyway.

 

[Brickwizard]

All my hard drives work except this one.

well dont keep it to yourself, what is it? or better still if its SATA hard drive, a clear picture of the manufacturer's label would help

 

[Caluser2000]

I did say that everything was working fine, i.o.w. everything I had issues with, with Mint. All my hard drives work except this one. I am trying to understand why and if I can fix it without loosing the hard drive or the data. If you can advise another Distro, please tell me as the number selections is just too great to be able to make a sensible selection having come from a lifetime use of Windows. Still like Windows but not Window 11 or being forced into buying a new laptop, which I can't afford anyway.

You are not forced to do anything at all.....

 

[Erik Groothuijzen]

well dont keep it to yourself, what is it? or better still if its SATA hard drive, a clear picture of the manufacturer's label would help

Yes it is SATA. Pictures attached.

 

[Brickwizard]

I can see from the codes its nearly 10 yrs old, well past the life expectancy for plate spinners, [5/7 yrs is nearer the norm, but some may last longer]

first thing to do is run an integrity check [give it a full health check]

 

[Erik Groothuijzen]

I can see from the codes its nearly 10 yrs old, well past the life expectancy for plate spinners, [5/7 yrs is nearer the norm, but some may last longer]

first thing to do is run an integrity check [give it a full health check]

As I indicated, it is recognised in Widows, where I have done a file check and everything is fine. I can see all the files and folders on that machine, as I use it for backups on both machines.When I plug it into any of the USB ports on the Linux machine absolutely nothing happens. As far as the age is concerned, I realise that but it is used infrequently.
Excuse my ignorance, but how can I run a health check when the drive is not detected?
I have thought of moving the files somewhere else temporarily with the Windows laptop and the reformatting the drive to Fat32. I am just trying to understand why Linux just does not see this particular drive. There are no spooks in engineering.

 

[osprey]

As I indicated, it is recognised in Widows, where I have done a file check and everything is fine. I can see all the files and folders on that machine, as I use it for backups on both machines.When I plug it into any of the USB ports on the Linux machine absolutely nothing happens. As far as the age is concerned, I realise that but it is used infrequently.
Excuse my ignorance, but how can I run a health check when the drive is not detected?
I have thought of moving the files somewhere else temporarily with the Windows laptop and the reformatting the drive to Fat32. I am just trying to understand why Linux just does not see this particular drive. There are no spooks in engineering.

Bear in mind that if the linux kernel is unable to see the externel drive, it cannot be used on the system.

Hence, for a failure such as you describe, the first step is to check whether the kernel sees the drive. There are several ways of doing that, one of which is described below.

Since the external drive is formatted in an ntfs filesystem, the installed system needs to have the packages: ntfs-3g, and fuse3, installed. They often are by default, but not always. One needs to check, and if they aren't installed, install them.

Once those packages are known to be installed, with the external drive disconnected, you can open a terminal and run the command:

sudo dmesg -w

The terminal screen then fills with what the kermel sees. The next step it to insert the drive's usb connector into a usb socket and watch the output in the terminal. If the kernel sees the drive, output will appear in the terminal showing information about the device including the device name.

If there's no output when pushing in the usb connection, then one ought to try all the usb ports on the computer to see if any one of them shows output.

To stop the output in the terminal, hit: ctrl + c.

Once the user can establish that the kernel sees the external drive, then you can go from there.

 

[Caluser2000]

I can see from the codes its nearly 10 yrs old, well past the life expectancy for plate spinners, [5/7 yrs is nearer the norm, but some may last longer]

first thing to do is run an integrity check [give it a full health check]

Age shouldn't matter,. I use stuff decades older and works perfectly including BigFoot spinning rust...

His drive is working in MS Windows. Some hardware is just a bit finicky between systems/OSs. Just like the 512meg I'm sorting out on my NEC 296/12 running MS Dos 6 or DRDos 6. MS Dos fdisk was fine but DR Dos's fdisk gave out an error and wouldn't touch it.

 

[Erik Groothuijzen]

Bear in mind that if the linux kernel is unable to see the externel drive, it cannot be used on the system.

Hence, for a failure such as you describe, the first step is to check whether the kernel sees the drive. There are several ways of doing that, one of which is described below.

Since the external drive is formatted in an ntfs filesystem, the installed system needs to have the packages: ntfs-3g, and fuse3, installed. They often are by default, but not always. One needs to check, and if they aren't installed, install them.

Once those packages are known to be installed, with the external drive disconnected, you can open a terminal and run the command:

sudo dmesg -w

The terminal screen then fills with what the kermel sees. The next step it to insert the drive's usb connector into a usb socket and watch the output in the terminal. If the kernel sees the drive, output will appear in the terminal showing information about the device including the device name.

If there's no output when pushing in the usb connection, then one ought to try all the usb ports on the computer to see if any one of them shows output.

To stop the output in the terminal, hit: ctrl + c.

Once the user can establish that the kernel sees the external drive, then you can go from there.

The kernel does see the drive
[12535.204776] usb-storage 4-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[12535.205180] scsi host6: usb-storage 4-1:1.0
[12536.231598] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate Expansion 0608 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[12536.232129] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[12536.254714] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 1953525167 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
[12536.255236] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[12536.255244] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 4f 00 00 00
[12536.255557] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Disk manager does not.

 

[Caluser2000]

The kernel does see the drive
[12535.204776] usb-storage 4-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[12535.205180] scsi host6: usb-storage 4-1:1.0
[12536.231598] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate Expansion 0608 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[12536.232129] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[12536.254714] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 1953525167 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
[12536.255236] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[12536.255244] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 4f 00 00 00
[12536.255557] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Disk manager does not.

Can you mount it via the shell in a terminal?

 

[Erik Groothuijzen]

Can you mount it via the shell in a terminal?

Haven't tried that yet but am now looking at GSmartControl where it is visible. Will try it though.

 

[Caluser2000]

Sounds like it isn't mounted for the drive manager to see it.

Wouldn't sweet it or lose any sleep over it though. Stuff happens

 

[Erik Groothuijzen]

Sounds like it isn't mounted for the drive manager to see it.

The health check look OK though.

 

[Erik Groothuijzen]

"Test #","Type","Status","% Completed","Lifetime hours","LBA of the first error"
1,"Short offline","Completed without error","100%","817","-" According to GSmartControl.

 

[osprey]

The kernel does see the drive
[12535.204776] usb-storage 4-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[12535.205180] scsi host6: usb-storage 4-1:1.0
[12536.231598] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate Expansion 0608 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[12536.232129] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[12536.254714] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 1953525167 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
[12536.255236] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[12536.255244] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 4f 00 00 00
[12536.255557] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Disk manager does not.

Thanks for that output. The kernel sees the external disk, but evidently not the partitions on the disk, if this is the whole output. That is, it sees the disk as /dev/sdb, but it's not clear that it sees partitions such as /dev/sdb1. It's the partitions that need to be mounted into the linux filesystem to be usable, which may or may not explain why disk manager can't see it. I can't say anything about disk manager since I'm not familiar with it, but normally, if the kernel saw a partition, I would mount the partition into the linux installation and it would become entirely usable. I can't say why no partitions are seen here.

Edit: To be clearer, here is an output of a removal drive:

[ 4189.879411] sd 9:0:0:0: [sda] 15633408 512-byte logical blocks: (8.00 GB/7.45 GiB)
[ 4189.880257] sd 9:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 4189.880260] sd 9:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
[ 4189.880569] sd 9:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 4189.884897]  sda: sda1 sda2   <-----PARTITIONS ARE VISIBLE!!!!
[ 4189.884997] sd 9:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk

It shows the partitions, as noted in the code at the arrow <-----. The output you provided lacks this.

 

[Erik Groothuijzen]

Can you mount it via the shell in a terminal?

sudo mount /dev/sdb then what? as the terminal does not list it

 

[Aristarchus]

If your drive was formatted long time ago, then yes it is possible that Windows will see partitions and Linux will not.
I would run from your MX, partition manager and see if attached disk partitions are visible. If not, then either get new disk (cheap nowadays) or backup content and re-format. This (re-formating) I would do using MX partitioning tool. Still it is possible that on the Linux side there is an issue.
Legacy stuff is often a bit finicky.
Again, sit back, relax and get your own experience. Remember that in spite of similarities these are different worlds. MS never had real intention to make it easy. Blame MB
Because you just started, it may happen (obviously) that you discover in the future some stuff is causing problems. Just be patient. You will get to the point that you i stall specific distro just once per hardware lifetime (this is my experience with linux).

 

[Erik Groothuijzen]

If your drive was formatted long time ago, then yes it is possible that Windows will see partitions and Linux will not.
I would run from your MX, partition manager and see if attached disk partitions are visible. If not, then either get new disk (cheap nowadays) or backup content and re-format. This (re-formating) I would do using MX partitioning tool. Still it is possible that on the Linux side there is an issue.
Legacy stuff is often a bit finicky.
Again, sit back, relax and get your own experience. Remember that in spite of similarities these are different worlds. MS never had real intention to make it easy. Blame MB
Because you just started, it may happen (obviously) that you discover in the future some stuff is causing problems. Just be patient. You will get to the point that you i stall specific distro just once per hardware lifetime (this is my experience with linux).

I hear you. Finding my way around is sometimes a mission. Any way fdisk -l now gives me permission denied on both sda and sdb. At least terminal now sees it. Now to find where to alter the permission........