I've searched around and found a lot of reports of people's FreeAgent drives randomly spinning down (and what to do about it), or for people who can see the drive but can't mount it.

I have a different problem: I can't see the drive at all. I plug it in, andit makes a beeping noise for a while (think 'Defcon 4', but not as loud). Then, it stops, but nothing's happened. fdisk -l just shows my normal 4 partitions.


I'm running Ubuntu (Karmic), and this is a 500 GB FreeAgent GO drive from Seagate (brand new, right out-of-the-box).

Get a root terminal and do this:

# ls /dev/disk/by-id

What this will produce is a list of all hard drives recognized as physically connected. You're probably looking for something that looks like "usb-Seagate_Free_Agent" or such, with a bunch of numbers in it. The numbers will probably correspond to the hard drive's serial number. You'll see more than one entry, and some of the entries will have "-part1", etc; those are the various partitions.

If you see something that looks like your drive there, then Linux can at least see the drive and it's not a physical connectivity or firmware issue. Your next step is this:

# tail -f /var/log/syslog

This is a kernel log file that can help you get a handle on what's going on. The above command monitors this file in real time, so anything that happens will scroll by. Unplug and plug in your drive, and see what it says. Cut and paste anything interesting here for further advice.

ls /dev/disk/by-id shows a list of my four internal partitions, but the external drive isn't showing up. The only power source is the USB connection, and the lights on the drive are flashing, so I assume it's not something as simple as a broken cable.

Any idea what the connection issue might be?

May be a solution here :
http://www.linux.com/archive/forums/topic/3880


Seagate FreeAgent means : Not free ? Windows only.?

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