puneetgomzi

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I bought a Toshiba External Hard Disk Drive in February 2007 with my Lenovo laptop. The HDD kept working fine for a few months after which it started showing an error which looked something like "Delayed Write Error. Write Failed" on Windows. I changed the USB cable thinking the error might be due to faulty USB cable.But the situation didn't improve.

Now, the HDD is completely undetectable in both Linux and Windows (i installed linux just a couple of months back) In Windows, it does show the "green arrow" icon on lower right corner, but drive's partition don't appear.

In linux, it doesn't even detect the drive.

Is there anyway, i can get the hard disk to work again?

AwesomeMachine

Fails in Linux and Windows. It could be a lost partition. You can try partitioning and formatting the drive. It really sounds like broken hardware. External USB hard drives use standard hard drives, but a very cheap, failure prone ATA to USB translator chip. Many times the chip fails, but the actual hard drive part is still good. I would take apart the external drive, rescue the actual hard drive from inside the external enclosure, buy a new enclosure for $20.00 off amazon, put the drive part from the old external drive into the new enclosure, and you should have a working external drive again. But I would make sure Linux really doesn't detect the drive. If you plug in the drive, do 'dmesg', and there is nothing indicating anything about a USB or SCSI device in the dmesg output, the ATA <> USB translator chip is probably dead.

onebuck

Hi,

If the OP does remove the hdd from the enclosure to place in another enclosure and the drive fails. I would say it is not the 'ATA <>USB' but the drive itself. The interface does not move between the enclosures. The drive interface does move with the drive as it is fixed to the drive. So the failure would still be with the drive. Either mechanical failure or interface errors.

puneetgomzi

Thanks to both AwesomeMachine and onebuck for their response.

A.M. said:
But how can find the partitions or modify when drive isn't being detected! If it does get detected, i can still run recovery commands and modify the partition tables later. But the problem is that HDD isn't detected.

When i plug the HDD in my laptop, the green indicator light does light up and it whirs as well. But the partitions appear nowhere, either in windows or linux.

This is the output that i get when i use "dmseg | less" command after plugging in the external HDD.

[root@localhost ~]# dmesg | tail
scsi 2:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to dead device
FAT: Directory bread(block 4980) failed
scsi 2:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to dead device
FAT: Directory bread(block 4981) failed
scsi 2:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to dead device
FAT: Directory bread(block 4982) failed
scsi 2:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to dead device
FAT: Directory bread(block 4983) failed
usb 5-7: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 28
usb 5-7: device descriptor read/64, error -71


I hope you get a better idea about the problem....