I've got 2 USB 2TB hard drives for backups. I've also got 5 linux OSs installed. One of those USB drives along with one of my OSs is giving me a problem.

4 of the 5 OSs see the USB drive as a data partition with various data folders. One of the OSs (antix 17) sees it as a PartedMagic USB stick.

Maybe some relevant background: about a year ago I accidentally wiped one of these drives by writing a PartedMagic ISO to it.


The OSs that see it correctly are:
Antix 17.1
Xubuntu 18.04
MX 17
DebianTesting

I tried a live USB with antix 16.2 and that, like antix 17, sees it incorrectly.


Any ideas are welcome.

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insufficient information. You can see files/directories therefore it is recognized, mounted and in use. There is only one exception, where there were no "data". Probably it was "only" not automounted or something similar, but anyway the device was found.
You need to check if you can mount it by hand or there was an error message somewhere around....

Look at the disk label on that drive.

"EFI" suggests to me that there may be a uefi issue or gpt issue. Uefi only knows fatxx so there has to be a fatxx there to use for uefi. The second usually gpt partition would be visible with gpt support.

Thanks for the suggestion, I' ve looked at it in gparted, and don't really see any label or special flags set. Interestingly, in thunar the files add up to about 507MB while in gparted it's showing 1.4TB in use. Which is the amount of data I've put on there.

I'm fairly sure that all USB bootable OSs have that "efi" folder, I've got several USBs here, one Lubuntu, one Antix, a different PartedMagic USB, etc. They've all got the "efi" folder.

I shut off "secure boot" and UEFI when I first installed linux on this machine.

And there's the other 4 OSs that see the drive correctly.