External Hard Drive Trouble

[ambrown]

Okay so I have an issue with my external hard drive but it's a little complex so I'll try to be descriptive but keep it somewhat concise.

First, I have a Seagate GoFlex Passport 750 GB external hard drive. One thing I thought I could do with it that would be great was boot Linux off it since partitioning my desktop's mostly used 80 GB hard drive would be more work than I want to do with that machine. So I found a guide to install Linux on the external drive and have an NTFS partition. Here's the link if you're curious:

http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/02/20/in ... t-the-end/

So after finally getting it all set up I was in business! And it worked great too, when the hard drive was plugged in Grub would come up and I'd boot right into Mint. I even did a full reinstall to fix some formating issues and put Mint 14 on while I was at it and it was running strong like a champ just like before. But when I plugged the hard drive into my wife's laptop for some use then tried to plug back into the desktop the computer didn't even recognize the drive. Grub doesn't comeup anymore and it just boots straight into Windows. And when in Windows I get the message "Unknown USB device" and even Disk Management doesn't recognize the hard drive.

I've been googling all over looking for the answer but I keep running into people talking about the warranty, and initializing the drive in Disk Maagement (which I obviously can't even do since it doesn't show up). Now in the past I had issues with power supply, since it wasn't getting enough power via the USB cable in the front of my PC, so the power light wouldn't even come on. But now I plug it in the back and so far it has always had enough power. Now when I plug it in the power light comes on when I boot up and the drive is whiring like normal so it's not a power issue.

Even more odd is when I plug the drive into my computer while booted on a Live CD version of Mint 14 I can see not only the hard drive, but all the partitions as well.

I had a similar issue back when I first got the hard drive, but as I said that was solved by simply plugging it into the back of my PC to get more power to the drive. The catalyst to my problem seems to be the using of the hard drive with my wife's laptop but I don't know how that would effect anything to where it can no longer be recognized at all even while booting and Windows isn't involved.

Oh and I did check my BIOS settings as well to make sure that they were set so I could boot off the external drive. Honestly I'm not too upset if Windows never recognizes the device, even though that was the whole point of the NTFS partition, but I miss my Mint desktop and I want it back!

Any suggestions about what might help would be great. I don't think it's hard drive failure due to the things described above so unless you really think my hard drive is calling it quits on me I don't really want to hear anything about warranties. That's kind of the last ditch effort really.

[telcnas]

1. OK, First of all what exactly "Disk Management" says under windows...

2a. You may either run Chkdsk from the command line (see details) or launch Windows Explorer, right click the drive that you wish to examine and choose Properties. Switch to the Tools tab and click the “Check Now” button under Error checking. Select “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” to perform a thorough disk check.

2b. SeaTools is free diagnostic tool that can completely test your hard drive regardless of the OS installed on it. The tool is provided by Seagate but it works with non-Seagate disk drives as well. To get started, you need to download the ISO image of SeaTools for DOS and create a bootable CD(simply burn iso image to a cd). Now boot the computer with the CD in the drive, accept the license agreement and run a long test (the full scan). If any defects are found, a list will be offered at the end or after aborting the disk scan

3. You may backup your data and try to format it with ntfs filesystem under windows...as you said the harddisk is completely recognized via live boot cd of linux mint....and then try to find out whether the problem persists or not....if it does then surely there may be something wrong with your harddisk....

Note: A very similar kind of situation occured to me....My hdd not get detected in windows but get recognized in linux....but later on I discovered that I was unable to store any data after a particular space limit even though my hdd was empty.....and even there was some data on my hdd which got corrupted.....Later on I replaced that hdd due to the existence of bad sector which got detected while scanning I mentioned above...........