Ubuntu :: External Hard Drive - GParted Wont Load Up When Plugged In And Disk Utility Doesn't Show It
Feb 7, 2011
I had this corrupted external hdd and so I formatted the main partition on it on windows but messed up in the formatting and ended up having to format the entire thing. I got some weird message about it not being initialized (no not mounted) so I was in compmgmt.msc in windows and right clicked it in device manager and it asked for master boot or GUID I selected the latter and formatted. Worked fine and all for a bit but now it doesn't show up as a drive. I noticed when using compmgmt.msc it showed up that it had installed driver software and was being recognized but in the partition editing area there was nothing on this drive, reinstalling driver software doesn't seem to help. Also GParted wont load up when I have it plugged in and Disk Utility doesn't show it. I am requesting help to fix this problem within Ubuntu 10.10 somehow so I can use it properly.
a friend of mine just given me an old 2004 IBM NetVista 8305 desktop and suggested to use Linux Ubuntu which is something new to me. So i installed it via USB memory stick & it works. After installation of the OS I am impressed with functionality & speed. when i conect the external hard drive via usb it doesn't show & i tried my usb flash disc it showed the same problem. I tried both disk in my laptop (Windows XP) & it works.
I have a 2 TB disk in an external SATA dock, formatted with a single ext3 (Linux) partition, which doesn't show up in the Windows 7 Computer Management->Disk Management utility, even as a raw/blank disk. I've verified that there's nothing wrong with the disk by connecting it to my Linux machine and mounting it, and I've verified that the dock is functioning properly by connecting a different FAT32-formatted disk, which mounts flawlessly as expected.I realize that I can't actually read the ext3 partition without additional software (e.g., Ext3IFS), but why doesn't the disk show up at all? Is there some sort of stupid anti-Linux filter built in? Is there any way to force Windows to recognize the disk, so that I can at the very least use direct block access with it?
Background: I want to clone an identical 2 TB disk onto this one. Due to my hardware layout, it's much easier to have the source disk attached to one machine and the destination disk connected to another, and do the clone over the network (the network is not a bottleneck with switched gigabit ethernet), than it is to hook them both up to one machine.(1) I did this once before when both machines were running Linux, but I've since upgraded the destination machine and decided to switch back to Windows for regular desktop use. I've got Cygwin installed, and have verified that the same basic method (dd + nc) will work, but I can't do anything if Windows doesn't even consider the destination disk to exist.I only have one eSATA port on each machine. Opening them up just to do this clone is a rather large annoyance. Also, since this is my backup disk, I'd like to eventually automate the cloning from the active disk to another one that I regularly swap with a third disk that I store off-site.
I try to install Ubuntu on my new HTPC. I start Ubuntu with the Live CD and it boots fine. Then I want to start installing Ubuntu on my hard disk.Unfortunately the installer does not see my hard disk which has 1 empty ext4 partition. However, it can be seen and managed in GParted.
I have an external hard-disk with two partitions, a fat32 and an ext3.I open gparted to resize the partitions but the only allowed operation is to check for information (see screenshot).
I finally got my new internal hdd for my laptop. I plugged it in and installed windows 7 64 bit. Then I partitioned my external hdd (WD mybook 640gb), and installed ubuntu 9.1 on a 200gb partition of it. The problem is that I didn't unplug the internal hdd before I installed ubuntu. Now the computer will not start unless I have the external hard drive plugged in.
So what should I do so that I will be able to go into windows 7 normally if the external hdd is unplugged? I would also like to be able to use ubuntu when I plug in the external hdd. I wouldn't mind having to go to the boot menu and choosing the external hard drive every time I wanted to use ubuntu.
The reason I partitioned the external hard drive was because it has a lot more space than my 250gb internal hdd, and I also wanted to leave space open to use as was intended, to back up stuff.
However, now that I think about it, I wouldn't mind partitioning the internal hdd and just leaving the external blank (which I should have done in the first place).
I have Seagate Freeagent Go 500GB external hard drive that I use for backup. I wanted to resize the partition so I used GParted to shrink the 500GB NTFS partition to 400GB. The other 100 I wanted to encrypt and use for some other more important files. For some reason, the shrink failed and I disconnected the hard drive and reconnected it. I didn't see the icon appear on the desktop. I went into the Disk Utility to discover that GParted's shrink error deleted all of the partitions on my hard drive. So I created a new 400GB NTFS partition and put back all of my files. The other 100 is unallocated currently.
It will normally mount automatically and show up on the desktop but the hard drive won't mount without me going into the Disk Utility and mounting it through there. I can't even mount it from the Terminal with root privileges. It gives me this:
Quote:
sudo mount /media/My Data mount: can't find /media/My Data in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab
Now, I can unmount with root privileges and I can unmount it from the Disk Utility. I can browse and edit the files within. But I can't unmount it from within Nautilus or on the desktop (the Safely Remove Drive option is not there).
The new 400GB partition also isn't detected by GParted. It just shows the whole drive as unallocated.
Trying to format a external Hard drive in NTFS using the utility program.
The error message is
"Error creating file system: helper exited with exit code 1: cannot spawn 'mkntfs -f /dev/sdb1': Failed to execute child process "mkntfs" (No such file or directory)"
I have this unique situation, I think. My TV plays certain files only through external USB storage. My Ubuntu server stores all of these files on local hard disks. I do not want to buy an external hard disk and then keep moving it between both. Now, strange as it may sound, is it possible to somehow connect my server to the PC and expose a given local hard disk connected to the server, as an external USB drive to the TV?
I recently tried Fedora on my laptop (previously Debian; I was bored one day) and gnome-disk-utility (palimpsest) warned me that my hard drive had numerous bad sectors. I re-installed Debian to find that this software was installed before so why had it not warned me?
When I load the disk utility, it says SMART is not available. I've got smartmontools installed, I can run a self-test with smartctl but I don't think this shows bad sectors. I've tried starting smartd on startup but the disk utility never changes from "SMART is not available". It is possible for it to work with this hardware as it works in Fedora on this laptop; any ideas?
I have been trying to get my 1tb External USB Hard Drive; WD External HD1021; but although I can see it in "Disk Utility" it does not appear on my Desktop as it used to and as it holds many family photographs and almost all of my music collection, some 150gb I am a little concerned. I am using Ubuntu Meerkat on my Toshiba Laptop.
I recently bought 320 GB Trancend external hard disk and working fine days back.Earlier i could copy from and to the hard disk with out any issue. I dont know what happened after that now i am not able to write any files in to the external hard disk. This is not NTFS formatted device. here is some of the out put from terminal.
Code: sundar@sundar-sundar:~$ fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
I have what I think are hybrid GUID/MBR disks that I created by splitting already MBR/NTFS disks via GParted, leaving unallocated space, then creating HFS partitions within OS X from the unallocated space on them.I want to delete those HFS partitions and re-extend the NTFS on them, but I can't because GParted sees the disk as somehow unchangeable; I assume OS X has done something to them.I now can't extend or do anything to the disks via the OS X Disk Utility OR GParted. What can I do?
I'm new to the ubuntu forums as well as ubuntu. I'm excited to learn more about linux itself as well as ubuntu. I got ubuntu 10.04 running on my toshiba L505D laptop by disabling acpi in the boot commands. My first question is how do i do this permanently, is this bad, and would updating fix the issue? If so how would I go about updating.
Secondly, when the external hard drive I installed ubuntu on is not plugged in to the laptop, GRUB rescue comes up. I kind of like this because it provides a level of hardware security. I would however like to know how to load my windows partition encase the external hard drive fails.
I have a Onetouch 4 mini 160GB I bought a year ago. I t used to work fine but all of a sudden it started to become a problem device. My home pc has two operating systems on it: Windows 7 and ubuntu 10.04 lucid. the drive often fails to load on both systems. Sometimes it's recognized, but the reads are very slow and opening a folder on the drive takes around 120 seconds. Itried reformatting the whole drive, chicking it with chkdsk but it didn't help. Now I have around 70 GB of data on the drive. On my office pc I don't have such a problem and the drive works fine.
My home pc has an Asus P5B motherboard and intel core 2 duo cpu. I tried unplugging other usb devices, plugging in the extra power cord (data + data/power) and it didn't help. The drive also makes beeping sounds when I try to browes the files on it. I'm sure thid is not OS related as both Windows and Linux have the same issue. This is the output of dmesg | tail command on linux. You can see the os keeeps "resetting" the drive:
I want to install Ubuntu onto a partition on my external hard drive, but my CD burner is broken so I can't just boot up with a live CD and do it that way. So can I install Ubuntu onto my external hard drive with the Startup Disk Creator that comes installed on Ubuntu? And if not is there another way I can do this?
I don't understand disk sizes in Linux. I have a 500GB drive. It's ext4. I have run "tune2fs -m 0" on it to reserve the amount of space reserved for root to 0.
I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 that comes with a Disk Utility. When I run "System->Administration->Disk Utility (palimpsest)" the disk shows up as 500GB (see picture). But when I run df -h it shows up as 459GB. So, I don't understand the discrepancy.
When I run df I get the following:
Question: Why is Disk Utility showing me something different than "df"?
I have got a hold of a extra hdd along with a hdd enclosure. I have tried looking for information on how to install linux on to one but haven't been completely successful on my search. So I turn to all of you. I was also wondering if its possible to have it were I can use it on multiple computers so I can use it for computer repair.
I recently bumped the power cable on my debian server at home. The computer shutdown, and since then hasn't been feeling like going past grub. When I boot the computer it gets to the "Welcome to Grub!" screen, but doesn't load my menu. I booted into a live cd and the hard drive seems intact and accessible. I re-installed grub without any problems, but the same problem is happening. I tried running fsck, but it says that the "device or resource is busy while trying to open /dev/sda". I am kind of stumped and would prefer not to reinstall debian to get this box running.
I need to re-format an external drive. All the instructions I have found start with figuring out where the drive is mounted (sda, hda, etc.). However, as soon as my RH Linux machine sees the drive's format (ntfs) it decides it won't even mount it in the first place. Gives me an error message. Also, the drive doesn't show up at all via "df -k". how to convince RHL to be a little more accepting?
In Ubuntu 10.04 all I had to do was turn on my external hard drive and it would automatically be detected and mounted. I just switched over to Ultimate Edition, which I think is Ubuntu 10.04 with a lot of stuff added on to it. The funny thing is when I turn on the external hard drive it doesn't get mounted, and I don't think it's even being detected. I looked in gparted and it doesn't show up there. If I boot into Ubuntu 10.04 and turn on the hard drive it still gets detected and mounted, so there's nothing wrong with it. Ultimate Edition can detect other things connected to USB, like my iPod, so I'm wondering why it can't detect my hard drive.
Edit: When I do tail -f /var/log/messages and if the drive gets detected, this is what it says:
[ 230.520892] usb 1-2.4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6 [ 230.639400] usb 1-2.4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice [ 230.639717] scsi9 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices [ 235.631550] scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access Maxtor OneTouch 0122 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
I have a 1TB usb External Hard drive (Segate), I would like to install linx on that drive. I tried red Hat it does not find hard drive. I run open suse, I partition the hard drive. After installation of disk 1 it reboots, at that point it does not go to usb external drive.
When I try to install 10.4 on my hard drive, I get all the way to the "Prepare Partitions" menu and there are no disks listed and all button are grayed out. I am installing on an EVGA X58 motherboard with Intel ICH10 and I have AHCI enabled. Does Ubuntu support AHCI? Do I need drivers to install?
I had a dual boot (windows 7 + debian), both of them installed in my internal hard disk, with the GRUB in it. I have recently installed a second linux distro (mint), but I put it in an external hard disk. Now the GRUB allows me to boot any of the three operating systems, but I need the external disk to do it. It seems that after the mint installation the GRUB is now working from the external disk (if the external disk is not connected, the machine does not boot.) �Is there a way to change the location of the GRUB, to the internal hard disk of my laptop?
Because a lot of users are using laptops now, and many want externals hard drives for backups, is there a program in Ubuntu (cross-platform with Windows would be nice) that backs up files to an external hard drive when the external drive is plugged in or on a timely basis? All backup systems seem to have a timed system, but these systems have annoying pop ups if your backup location is non-existant (e.g. Deja Dup).
Use case 1: I plug in my external, the program recognizes that and starts a backup.
Use case 2: I leave my external in all day and every 6 hours, my laptop backs up my files to it.
I have installed ubuntu 10.10 on and external usb drive and now my computer which runs XP will not boot unless the external drive is connected and on. Can I by pass this situation or do I have to uninstall ubuntu altogether and start over?
I got a dell inspiron 1501 laptop with a 80Gb sata drive what is the best solution to add data storage space for someone that love to have multiples operating systems at hand Note: I use mostly linux so I won't need to change my laptop for many years maybe ...
