My computer (Linux Mint, Gnome) doesn't see my external (usb) hd anymore.
I use this to make recordings with my hard disk recorder (Emtec S800H) and then plug it into my computer for editing purposes. The last recording I made broke off after 10 minutes. When I plugged the hd into my computer, at first it I couldn't do any editing (not even renaming) because supposedly the file system was read-only, even though everything is rwxr-xr-x, with the normal user as owner. Even starting Commander as root didn't help (and I couldn't even alter the permissions). When I plugged it back into the hdr, that started acting up (very slow browsing, replay slow and stops after a few seconds). So I restarted it, which seemed to solve that. But when I plugged the hd into my computer again, it didn't even see it. And now the hdr doesn't see it either.

As suggested in the sticky note, I ran lsusb, which gave the following results:
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Just to make sure the usb-port is not at fault, I plugged in a camera in the same port instead, which added the following line to the above:
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 054c:0010 Sony Corp. DSC-S30/S70/S75/F505V/F505/FD92/W1 Cybershot/Mavica Digital Camera

I'm not sure if this is useful, but here is lspci as well:
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI bridge [K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:08.0 Mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3512 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 01)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA RAID Controller (rev 80)
00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA G400/G450 (rev 04)

Is your USB drive a flash or a physical hard drive? Post the make/model.

Look at the output of the dmesg command after you plug in the drive. Do you see any drive related error messages?
Drives fail. I doubt the HDR caused it to go bad.

It's a physical hd, WD7500H1U-00.
I ran dmesg to look at the last entries (and the 'timestamp' with which each line starts), plugged in the hd, waited a minute to be sure and ran dmesg again, but nothing was added. (Doing the same with my camera again did result in about a dozen new messages.)

The reason I suspect the hdr is that, quite frankly, it's a piece of garbage. I've read several reports (too late) that state that the hardware is good but the software sucks. It crashes regularly and it can't be a coincidence that it operated errarically (more so than at other times) just when the hd starting having problems. And how likely is it that the hd messes up the hdr? Also, the hd is only about a year old. No guarantee, I know, but it adds to the probability that that is not where the fault lies.

Since the drive is not being recognized at all then it is bad. The actual hard drive might be good but the case isn't working anymore.

You suggest the case isn't good. Might it then help if I opened it up, took out the drive and plugged it in as an internal hd? I already tried opening it, but I don't see any way to do that without breaking it open. Which would void any warranty. But then a warranty wouldn't help me recover the recordings on the hd, which are more important to me than the drive itself. Do you give me the go-ahead?
The reason I ask is that it seems like too much of a coincidence if the hdr were not the cause. But if it is, then I assume it would have to be a problem on a software level, which I suppose is not what you are saying.

Obviously it is difficult from my end to know why it is not working. Not much you can do if the drive is not being recognized at all.
Make sure the power supply is working and you are using a known good USB cable.
Can you feel the drive spinning when you apply power?

There are professional data recovery companies that can be used that will still retain the warranty if desired.

I have not taken this particular model apart so I can not help. Also:
http://support.wdc.com/product/kb.as...id=110&lang=en

I have not taken this particular model apart before so you are on your own. IMHO it is probably a coincidence and I do not see how software could of caused the drive to fail in this manner i.e the filesystem would of been corrupted but the drive would still be recognized by the computer.

Ah! As suggested here, I used a bank card and a cd, threw in another cd, my fingernails, some swearing and brute force, and now finally I got the damned thing to open. It's a boy sata! So I plugged it in internally, started up the computer and now I can access it.
But I still can't wite to it. I can, however, copy files to another drive and work on those copies. So I might copy everything to another drive, format the WD, copy everything back again, put it back in its box and see if it works again. But I don't have that much space (330 GB) left on my other drives. And I don't want to buy another hd just for this. Do you have any idea what might cause this? Oh, and this is silly - how can I check what file system it is? I'm new to the gnome version of Linux Mint and I can't find a program for this, not even in Synaptic. (Note that I'm not good with the terminal.)

By default they are formatted as NTFS from the factory. Depends on the distribution but many automatically mount NTFS as read only for users. Look at the output of the mount command with no options to see how it is mounted and its filesystem. You can remount as read write for all.

If you can access the drive then I would say the case is broken and would not bother sticking it back in. You can purchase USB drive cases just make sure it is for SATA and correct for the size of drive (2.5 or 3.5").

Oh, I forgot to mention, there's a filesize limit of 4 GB. So it's fat? Yes, mount says:
/dev/sdd1 on /media/sdd1 type vfat (rw)
That's rw! I tried another rename, to be sure, but still no go, as a normal user and as root (although there no longer seems to be a distinction between normal user and root anymore, which I find very confusing, but that's a different matter).
Note that I've been using the drive for over a month without problems, so it has nothing to do with factory settings.

Corection. I found the space to copy everything to and then format the drive. That's going to take some time (old computer), but it should solve the problem. I still don't get why I couldn't write to the drive, though.

But anyway, thanks for your help!

Could you describe the power connector that the drive uses. If it is a multipin cable, then it may supply more than one voltage, and one of them is bad. Where I work we had a problem with a Lacie firewire drive a couple of times. The drive would spin up and you could here the heads moving. But the electronics that interfaced with the drive wasn't working. Both times, replacing the power supply fixed the problem.

If you have an identical drive you could try swapping the external power supplies.

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Another possible problem is if you had a security kernel update and haven't rebooted the computer. If the usb modules aren't loaded, the old locations for them may not exist anymore.

too late now but the problem was most likely the usb cable they are really prone to the wires breaking from flexing