I have two portable drives. These were loose hard drives I plugged into USB cases of the same model I just purchased, and I’ve formatted the drives as NTFS for compatibility with my wife’s and son’s computers. These are to back up ISOs of my DVD collection.
(Why two drives? To back each other up in case one fails. I had the drives sitting around and empty USB cases are cheap. Seemed like a good idea.)
The 750GB drive comes up flawlessly and I’m able to copy everything to it on my system, but the 1TB drive isn’t recognized. It works just fine if I plug it into a Windows machine, but my Xubuntu one acts like it can’t open it. I’ve reformatted the drive both in Windows and from Gparted, but I can’t mount it. It appears in Places and Thunar, but if I tell it to mount, it returns the following (see attached).
I’ve scanned the drive with chkdsk /r and it finds no errors. Any ideas?
Because the error says “system-managed device” and uses /mnt/wwn-0x50004cf212363dc4-part1 as the mount point, it’s likely that /etc/fstab has an entry for that disk. Run grep -n 50004cf212363dc4 /etc/fstab to find the line. Put a # at the start of that line with sudo nano /etc/fstab, then run sudo systemctl daemon-reload and mount the drive from Thunar again.
Well I’ll be! That worked. I’m not sure why I put that line in fstab, but I must have at some point. Maybe I was using this drive for bulk storage at the time, but I could swear I’ve always used full-size hard drives for that. Puzzling.
