WD 1 terabyte external USB drive, moth old suddenly disappeared, won't remount

Yeah but it was working again flawlessly since it came back on line and it's only a few months old. The working one is five years old I was able to work out. I never got back to running diagnostics through any program since it spun back up at the beginning of the month from just being busy.

I'm still reading about trying to figure out of I can force mount it using SmartCtl or something else. I have GSSmartControl up for the last few hours trying to learn how to use that to see if I can figure out the address or mount point or whatever it's called.

I really am a novice as I said because I've never had this problem before.

And it's little white power indicator light is on and when I plug it in I can feel the drive inside spinning for a bit until it seems to idle down from not mounting or connecting. It doesn't seem "dead" at all.

The laptop * drives has been sitting on a well ventilated spot undisturbed.

99/100 times I use it I'm usually not even touching anything as it's across the room and I'm working off my wireless keyboard mouse looking at the screen on an HDMI tv. Nothing has jostled the drives or laptop in anyway unless the cactus over in the window is rough-housing things when I'm not looking.

mike@ToshibaBlack:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 04f2:b303 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:0138 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTS5138 Card Reader Controller
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 1058:25e1 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. My Passport (WD20NMVW)
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 046d:c534 Logitech, Inc. Unifying Receiver
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. Hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
ID 046d:c534 Logitech, Inc. Unifying Receiver
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. Hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub


Im not sure why I have those other entries as GsmartControl only shows the main HD and outboard DVD burner. The cheapo usb hub has my wireless Logitech receiver plugged in for mouse and keyboard and the entry for the built in SD card reader. That'as all I understand in my noviceness.

I can't figure out if there's a terminal command to force it to look for the other WD drive or what?

Again I've swapped the interchangable WD cables between the two drives and tried rotating which USB plug so they all work with my outboard DVD burner, "working" Passport and so on.

All I can think of is maybe the new passport might be getting under-volted or something?

Are the disks powered up via an external USB hub or directly from your laptop? If via a passive, i.e. non-powered, external hub you could indeed have power problems. You can normally connect a single disk directly to a laptop USB port and expect it to work. Having to share the power between two disks and any other USB device connected to the non-powered hub will give unpredictable results (if it works at all!).

My

Play Bonny!

If you have any USB3 port on your computer, try to connect the drive there. According to the USB specifications USB2 can deliver up to 0.5A, instead of 1A for the USB3 ports. Using it through a passive USB hub (without any dedicated power block) can be a problem, especially if you share this hub for other devices (USB sticks, keyboard, mouse, wireless or audio adapters, other drives, etc).

The simplest way to get some info from the smartctl command is from the terminal through

sudo smartctl -a

The report on screen gives useful info about several aspects of the hard drive condition for all hard drives on the computer. It can perhaps help you to understand what is wrong with the drive. You can run longer tests too after that.

The fact that the drive is quite new is meaningless. Several years ago I had myself a hard drive that was bad even before I could partition it. I connected it to the sata and power cables in the computer case and tried to partition it during 2 days with no success. The smartctl report showed that the drive was bad, and took it back to the shop. I remember I've bought 2 identical drives; one of them was definitely good (partitioning was successful in just a few minutes with GParted Live, the other one was bad as I wrote above.

The set up I had when everything was working was the two Passports were plugged directlu into the two USB ports on one side of the laptop and there was a lone one on the other side I had a non-powered el cheapo 4 port hub plugged in with the tiny Logitech receiver for my wireless keyboard and mouse. I think the laptop is circa 2012 or so midrange Toshiba.

It's been a champ though I don't carry it about anymore because the battery and internal DVD burner are long dead. I actually swapped out the DVD burner and the second one died too. I've had a cheapo external burner hooked up through the hub and it has worked fine for several years.

I bought a new 1TB Seagate drive today at Wallymart and wanted to get a powered hub while I was out doing my Quarantine run for supplies but I couldn't get over in a lane for Best Buy and said fuckit, wasn't going to make a hellish loop in the traffic to come back to it.

I kind of marvel at these sub-$50 1TB drives cause I have an enormous SCSI enclosure with a 40 meg drive from nearly 30 years ago as part of my personal museum of stuff I didn't throw out. I have an old Mac llx with a whopping 24 megs of ram, a 100 meg or something hard drive a bunch of cards that ran an RGB-connectored 20in Sony monitor that did 256 colors 30 years ago. The people from the art dept at the bank came over to ooh and ahh at it because they'd never seen such a beastie.

I can't remember if we ran Photoshop 2.5 or 3.0 on it anymore. I was making photoshopped memes before Dawkin's coined the term and Steve Case dreamed of flooding your mailbox with AOL disks...

So I'm not exactly new to computers, I just don't know what the hell I'm doing in this fantastic future version of computing most of the time.

I look at the Unix command line terminal and I wish I could hit the intercom and say, "Lt Cmdr Data, report to my quarters immediately!"

Any advice on how I should pre-format and partition the new 1TB drive would be greatly appreciated by this dinosauer as has everyone's patience been with me so far.

Originally Posted by ElvisGump Any advice on how I should pre-format and partition the new 1TB drive would be greatly appreciated by this dinosauer as has everyone's patience been with me so far.

Easy peasy.
With the new drive as the only USB device plugged in from the command line run "sudo fdisk -l"
The output will identify all drives that are active and list the partitions.
What you need is the device that has no partitions yet. /dev/sdb maybe? All that have partitions will shows some data about the device followed by one or more lines about the partitions.
My flash drive shows: And you can see that I have one partition defined (/dev/sda1) on the flash (/dev/sda)

Disk /dev/sda: 116.48 GiB, 125057368064 bytes, 244252672 sectors
Disk model: USB 2.0 FD      
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc3072e18

Device     Boot Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *       32 244252671 244252640 116.5G  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

Once you have identified the device that has no defined partitions (I will continue with my guess of /dev/sdb) then use gparted with the command

sudo gparted /dev/sdb

and from the gui you will be able to 1) create a new partition table, 2) define one or more partitions and 3) format each partition the way you want it. You can also name the partition and label the file system while there. For linux you probably want it formatted as ext4, but I am just guessing about what you want.

Once done and you have applied all the changes then exit gparted and disconnect the drive. Now you can connect it and use it the same as any other USB connected device.

One thing I want to reiterate, based on earlier discussion. As long as each drive has it's own power source there should be no problems. However, if the drives are drawing power through the USB then multiple drives can easily exceed the power available through the USB port/bus. Please be cautious about how many USB powered devices are connected at one time.

I would be amazed if the drive isn't already partitioned and formatted as NTFS. I've never bought a USB drive that wasn't. In any case, I format my drives as ext4, although I'm starting to consider btrfs. Never NTFS, though. Partitions are up to you. How are you going to use the drive? For a data only drive, I mostly just use one partition, although I have a couple with a small encrypted partition for storing files I don't want to be easily available. But my needs are not your needs. Some people need multiple partitions for some things. I don't, because I use multiple drives. YMMV.

My confidence in doing stuff in the command line of the terminal is very low as all I've ever done is monkey-see, monkey-do - me being the monkey! All I've ever used it for really is copy-paste instructions like getting system updates and the like between versions and all. I grew up on GUI stuff being a graphics guy where the warnings of "ARE YOU SURE YOU MEAN TO NUKE ALL YOUR DATA IS WHAT YOU MEANT TO DO?" messages prevented me from being a menace to myself.

The most experience with terminals was gee, a quarter century ago with a friend who used IRIX on an SGI Indy to explain Unix commands to me. Or I should say tried to. Me and his dog were about equally confused. I was much better drawing on Waccom in Power Animator or Elastic Reality, but when it came to command line stuff I might have been dumber than the dog.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is when I got the original 1TB drives, I unboxed them, plugged them in and a ha, they worked out of the box and I just started shoveling files and making folders and never gave anything a second thought.

Occasionally I unplugged the original one and plugged it into my Windows laptop to sneaker-drive stuff over to my Ubuntu machine without a second thought to compatibility or anything. Old Mac discs were recognized by my Ubuntu so I again just thought it didn't matter a jot to Ubuntu.

I've been unplugging the errant Passport drive, shutting down the Ubuntu machine over night, rebooting in the morning, swapping that drive around the 3 usb ports in hopes that it's just in a coma and will wake up again to no luck.

I'm wondering if because I used it out of the box and now can't determine what happened, did I make a mistake just plugging and playing it in Ubuntu?

Should with my new Seagate drive should I partition or format it in a special way that makes file system errors or whatever more recoverable should the master file list get corrupted or however that works? As far as Ubuntu is concerned because 90% of what I do is in GIMP editing photos I don't want to have to recreate from scratch.

Thanks for putting up with me!

If you only plan to use the drive on a Linux machine, formatting it with a Linux filesystem makes things easier. If you plan to use it on Windows, then it may be better to leave it as it is. I really don't know what filesystems Windows can read these days, because I haven't kept up with it for almost 20 years. Gparted can do the format for you, it's a GUI, and what I generally use.