I pulled an old 60 gig drive out of my old desktop and used an external hard drive enclosure to connect it to my laptop through usb. When I plugged the drive in the kernel detected it as 30 gigs in size and refused to properly read it. So I formatted and it only formatted as 30 gigs, but appears to read and write data just fine.

I'm trying to figure out if this is a problem with the usb_storage module or if the drive might have damage. Can anyone suggest tools or tricks to test it out? Thanks

welcome to LQ.

test out the hdd in your old desktop to see if all 60GB are there. they should be, unless this is some weird formatting problem where the laptop won't recognize the other 30GB. i doubt it though - my guess is there's a compatability issue with conencting it to your laptop through usb.

i have had problems before with certain computers having trouble recognizing certain formats on drives. when this happens i just use some utility that erases all data on a disk, and problem solved. but first check to see if the desktop will recognize it as 60GB.

I should have mentioned that I pulled the drive out of the workstation because the motherboard died (it was an OLD computer). Anyways a few hours ago I purchased a new 80 gig drive and Linux had no problem finding the whole drive and formatting it. I'm just going to trash the 60 gig one.

send it to me, ill use it. lol. it probably is just a bad drive then.

Downloading and running the manufactuerers utility can tell you for sure if the drive is bad or failing.
This CD has a selection of them.