[SOLVED] Unable to get computer to work with external drive.

JDWheel · 05-25-2016, 02:32 PM

I have a Seagate Free Agent external hard drive that was working on Ubuntu 15.10 when I upgraded to 16.04 the computer no longer recognizes that the external hard drive is connected.

yancek · 05-25-2016, 04:56 PM

Is it? Connected securely? Ubuntu usually has external drive partitions under /media/username. Is that how you tried to access it? If not, how did you?

jefro · 05-25-2016, 05:07 PM

Hello and welcome to LQ.

My guess might be user permissions for mounting and reading.

Be sure to start with lsusb and mount commands to see what is going on maybe first.

Once in a while distro's move where they mount things too but not sure in this case.

Shadow_7 · 05-25-2016, 06:23 PM

It could be a kernel issue, where a module that gives access to the drive is missing. Like IDE/PATA or other legacy stuff. Depends on the hardware in question. If you can scroll through the boot options to the 15.10 kernel, that might be a workaround. If it boots, you might check /proc/partitions for the available device and partition names. It might just be using a different name. Or the drive died and literally can't be seen by anything for eternity.

JDWheel · 05-30-2016, 09:27 AM

Well I stumbled onto the solution. I connected the drive to my Macbook and used the disk utility app first aid and then formatted the drive for MSDOS Fat file system and I lost all the data but recovered the use of the drive.

JDWheel · 05-30-2016, 09:29 AM

Problem solved I want to thank the people here who helped with this.

beachboy2 · 05-30-2016, 12:57 PM

JDWheel,

I am glad that you solved your problem.

Please go to your original post and click on the Thread Tools tab above the text box and then click on Mark this thread as Solved.

JDWheel · 05-30-2016, 03:41 PM

Sorry but I don't see any thread tools tab above text box.

beachboy2 · 05-30-2016, 03:51 PM

JDW,

Go back to post #1.