external hard drive flakey
 

Ive got an external hard drive used for school, its a firestorm (generic brand from china i guess) 40gb. its firewire or usb 2.0.

problem is, it works, then it doesnt work. it has only worked a few times in windows. i'd plug it in, and it wont be detected, so i reboot in mepis and create a new fat32 partition on it, and then it's readable until i reboot.

same for linux, i can read it when its plugged in at boot time, but if i unplug it, then try and remount it, it stops working. it wont work with live cd linux distros anymore, its not detected anymore, even though its working in ubuntu.

its just a flakey drive. it works fine on the macs at school, just plug it in and it works. its beginning to piss me off. i spent hours one night just getting a new partition table on it.

anything fdisk will do? maybe it has a ton of bad sectors?

possibly incorrect, but i remember reading (rescently) that you cant run linux fdisk tools over a usb drive.


If it were mine, I would try taking the drive out of its cage, installing it in a system, and running disk diagnostics on it to determine its overall heatlth. if the hardware isnt dying, try reformatting it however you like, then putting it back in the cage to try again.


let us know what you come up with, I know other users have been having trouble with usb drives, especially since they are becomming more popular.


*my usb dvd burner works perfectly, so I didnt have to figure out how to make it work*

i thought about taking it out of the case those few hours i spent working with it. there's a serial number/model number sticker keeping it together, and im affraid if i peel it off, ill void the warranty. if that's the case, the school wont replace it. thought if it comes down to it, ill leave that option open.

-edit-
another note.

i just stuck it on another machine in which i was making a fileserver, so i was reinstalling linux on there. i plugged in the usb cables, the drive turned on by the indicating LED, the drive spins, the light flashes and blinks. it was formatted with fat32, so i told ubuntu to format it with ext3. so as the ubuntu installation went on, everything looked fine. it reboots to get into the base system and finalize the installation, and the drive could not be detected (its a scsi drive at /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdc1)

-second edit-
drive seems to work once the system is fully booted. weird.