Unable to mount portable hard drive on Ubuntu

Question

My portable hard drive (WD My Passport), which used to work correctly now does not automount on my Ubuntu system. It does work on a Windows machine or even when plugged into WD HD TV, which is a Linux based device. There's one NTFS partition spanning the whole drive.

When I plug the disk in, I see the following in dmesg:

[269259.504631] usb 1-2.2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 20
[269259.604674] usb 1-2.2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

However it does not mount in GNOME and I don't see it when I type:

sudo fdisk -l

Any suggestions why this might be? I repaired the partition using chkdsk on Windows, so the issue is probably not filesystem related.

Also, I don't see anything resembling my hard drive in the output of lsusb.

Answer 1

You have posted that you see only two lines relating to the event. You say that it used to work. What changed? (Fundamental Question!!)

Do you have a module loaded to handle USB drives (usb_storage) - check it with lsmod? I do not see that in your log extract.

Check with a USB stick - does that automount? Same question with module as above.

Check if anything has been loaded by looking at /sys/block - do you see an entry for sdX which corresponds to the drive?

As it is a NTFS drive, did you check if the partition /dev/sdX1 can be mounted read-write:

          ntfs-3g.probe --readwrite /dev/sdX1 (substitute X with the letter you expect)

What is the output?

When I plug in a USB stick to my Mint 11/11.04 machine I see:

[17127.015279] usb 1-1.2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 7
[17127.179518] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas
[17127.202757] Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
[17127.203003] scsi6 : usb-storage 1-1.2:1.0
[17127.203233] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[17127.203235] USB Mass Storage support registered.
[17128.201575] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Pretec   08GB             2.10 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[17128.202332] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[17128.203260] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 15794175 512-byte logical blocks: (8.08 GB/7.53 GiB)
[17128.205544] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[17128.205552] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
[17128.206614] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Asking for cache data failed
[17128.206622] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[17128.210362] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Asking for cache data failed
[17128.210368] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[17128.265172]  sdb: sdb1
[17128.326379] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Asking for cache data failed
[17128.326386] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[17128.326392] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

Main thing is to do it logically - is it a system problem with usb storage generally? Is it related to the fs type of the drive? (FAT/NTFS/Ext3 etc) Do you have access to another NTFS drive to try? Did you update the ntfs-3g package recently? If so can you roll back and check with the older package? At this stage I would not expect a new driver to be needed - assuming that the drive worked ok previously.

Let us know how you get on.

Answer 2

What version of Ubuntu are you using?

Answer 3

So there is no mount point in /media ? I find it hard to believe dmesg shows it's presence, but sudo fdisk -l doesn't.

NTFS support is enabled by default for Ubuntu 9.04, but perhaps there is a problem with the ntfs-3g package, maybe reinstalling that package might work.

Answer 4

I know that some hard disks, due to their sector size could not mount under Linux. The biggest I have is a 1 TB hard disk, on an eSATA controller, and it seems to mount fine, whether it is internal or in an external enclosure.

Chances are that a special driver would be required for this devices. Try to google on your hard disk device model number (you could get all details from the Device Manager under Windows), and see what package to install under your Linux distro.

That would be my way to an eventual solution.