An external hard drive shows up in “Disks” but Ubuntu fails to mount it . I cannot run any diagnostic test on it as “SMART Data & Self Test” is grayed out. The drive was working fine yesterday, I have no idea what changed. I’m new with Ubuntu and all of the potential fixes I’ve found are very complicated and way over my head. I’ve tried many of them without any clue as to what I’m doing and nothing has worked. I’ve restarted the computer several times but no luck. I’ve tried a different Ubuntu laptop but with the same result. A Windows computer also recognizes the drive is present but won’t assign a drive letter so I can’t access files. Please pretend I am 5 years old. Is there any easy way to fix this? Thank you in advance.
System Details Report
Hardware Information:
Hardware Model: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. VivoBook_ASUSLaptop X515JA_F515JA
That and the fact that a different Ubuntu laptop also shows the same issue, is a strong indication that the drive is defective. And that usually happens after reboots or just regular cold boots after some downtime. The drive just fails to spin up, most probably.
Thanks, you may be right, it may be defective. But I can feel it spinning and it does show up in “Disks” so I’m hoping it can be repaired. Thanks again.
Don’t laugh … put the drive in the fridge for 10 min, then connect again to your laptop. Old IT tale, the goal is to shrink internal components to temporarily fix issues but probably drive is dead.
Also, pop a terminal and type sudo dmesg do you any errors when the drive is connected?
The next thing that can be defective is the read/write head or the controller moving it. There are plenty moving parts in disks, so they are kind of doomed to fail eventually. As the old saying goes: there are three types of disks, those that have died, those that will die, and those that have been replaced before dying.
And that could also kill it for good, because of condensation. If it’s outside the temperature window of it’s specs, it may fail for any reason.
See this Seagate spec [PDF] for an example. And big differences in temps cause condensation, which may short out some circuits, which is why it is good practice to let devices that come fresh off the delivery van, which drove through the cold winter snow, to acclimate for at least an hour before even plugging them in.
Thanks I’ll try the frig trick. I get the following error message when the drive is plugged in “Unable to access ”Seagate” Error mounting /dev/sda2 at /media/richc101/Seagate: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock or /dev/sda2,missing codepage or helper program or other error.” None that helps me at all.
Then, attach it to a Windows 11 PC and see if you can run chkdsk (or other similar Windows utilities)
Depending on the condition of the disk, it may fix it, it may not.
I don’t have access to a Windows 11 computer but I could reboot this laptop to Windows 10. I ‘ll try that after I’ve exhausted other potential fixes. Thanks.
The only thing that comes to mind, given that the GUID partition table seems to be botched, is testdisk. But it’s not for the faint of heart.
sudo apt install testdisk
Ideally you should make a bit-for-bit image of the whole drive first, before committing any changes suggested by testdisk. And don’t write anything to the drive, because that might destroy still recoverable information.
I ran the testdisk install and it seemed to work but testdisk doesn’t show up in my apps. Where do I locate it? Sorry if I seem stupid. This is all new to me.
