I have some problems with a hdd which is presently installed in an external USB housing. Any comments appreciated.

The drive is a Seagate ST375064 – ONS Barracuda ES. The volume is 750GB.

When I power on the system if the drive is connected and also powered, the system will not boot. The BIOS hangs in detecting USB devices. The message is “Auto-detecting USB Mass Storage Devices ...... Device #01” The system will already detect 500GB drives connected at power on and so I do not quite know the reason for this failure. If I power on the drive after Ubuntu has loaded then the drive is found.

Moving on, if I look at the drive properties the firmware is described as “G” which seems a bit odd. I was expecting to see the same as the drive label which is “3.AEG”.

So I wonder if I need to reflash the firmware. Problem here is that the Seagate site does not show any firmware downloads or a firmware loader. Do how do I do this....

When mounted, the drive has one icon on the desktop. Fine. But if I look using a browser I find that the drive appears twice, as “disk” and as “disk-1”. Double click these items and I find that the content is quite different, one has some folders and the other has more. I cannot delete the second item even with root access.

I just booted the Live CD and ran Gparted and formatted the drive again to ext3. But .... on reboot back to my normal desktop I looked at the drive and saw that a number of directories had survived the format which I find to be amazing, I cannot see how this can happen.

So .... I was wondering, since support on the Seagate site is minimal and since I am in no position to request a RMA, are there any suggestions of what I can do next ..... ?

what happens when you run

Sound like there is more than one partition on the drive.

Dennisk

This is what I get

peter@P4P800X:/media/disk$ fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sdd: 750.1 GB, 750155292160 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd2 * 2 91201 732564000 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdd5 2 91201 732563968+ 83 Linux

oh .. and perhaps I should also have mentioned that the drive properties (from the desktop icon) shows 652GB free space. After format it should be about 698GB free space so something is happening .....