I am having some problems getting an external usb hdd to work. The drive is
a fujitsu MHT2040AT. I have pluged it into the usb port and it powers on, but I am not sure which device entry under /dev represents is. What makes matters worse is that the MBR is missing from this drive which means I am unable to read to it.. How do I go about rescuing this drive from the trash
heap?

Even if it is a raw disk without a partition and hence no filing system inside it will always show up in a root console by command
which reports its size and the device name as detected and used in Linux.

If you can't see the device in the above terminal command (in root) then it is time to check the hardware connection.

If no one says it then I will shout

Welcome to the Forum.

Another approach might be to look at the output of

dmesg

after you have plugged in the drive

thankyou for your help

I think it is time to check the hardware.

_stan_

one way to know the device name is after plugging into the usb drive, just run the command

dmesg

this command will give the output of kernel.


at the end of the output you will find the detection of this hardware and details about this hardware.

this is deteced as /dev/sda1 if your system does not have any SCSI hard disk already.

if you have already 1 SCSI harddisk then
your new usb harddisk number detected as no. of SCSI disks + 1

dmesg yields the following output;

usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
usb 4-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
SCSI subsystem initialized
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.
usb-storage: device found at 2
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
Vendor: FUJITSU Model: MHT2040AT Rev: 0000
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00
usb-storage: device scan complete
scsi 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
SCSI device sda: 78140160 512-byte hdwr sectors (40008 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 27 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sda: 78140160 512-byte hdwr sectors (40008 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 27 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda:<6>sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x08000002
sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 0
sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x08000002
sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0

Suspect this is a hardware problem. I assume that the disc isn't working with Windows either.

haven't tested is under windows... I'm pretty sure it is a paperweight

This is a tentative idea. I wonder if it is worth trying to reformat the disc. It seems to have been identified as sda and I assume that none of your internal drives is sda

Before to format it how do we know sda is not an internal hard disk that has an operation system providing the dmesg data?

A "fdisk -l" output can tell us a lot of things.