External hard drive showing up but not opening

FellowCoder · 06-15-2020, 11:15 AM

Its showing up on file manager but when i try to open it it says "the operation is already pending", is it broken? Can i fix it without loosing data?

(I am using Lubuntu 18.04 and my external drive is from Samsung)

beachboy2 · 06-15-2020, 11:59 AM

FellowCoder,

What is the output of:

Code:

lsblk -af

teckk · 06-15-2020, 12:43 PM

What file system is the external drive? If it ext4 or fat mount it to some folder with the mount command.

If it is a ntfs drive then use ntfs-3g so that you can read/write to it.

If you want to see if the drive is working right, or if the usb plug is having problems

Code:

dmesg -w

Then plug the drive in and see if it becomes ready. It will also tell you what the device node is. If it keeps scrolling info, then the usb port may be getting stretched out or damaged.

See the man pages:
man mount
man ntfs-3g
man dmesg
man lsblk
man lspci
man lsusb

FellowCoder · 06-15-2020, 01:36 PM

I changed to windows(with dual boot) and it worked.In lubuntu it as soon as it gets connected it mounts it(but i cant open it yet) which i think that shouldnt be happening

martin smith · 06-17-2020, 12:24 PM

There could be several reasons why your external hard drive may fail to respond to your Windows PC It can be caused by some technical glitch in your operating system, or it might be due to the drive's internal hardware failure It can also occur when you fail to plug in the device through the USB port properly.