can't configure external USB drive any way at all

[SaintDanBert]

I have a 1.0 TB external, USB hard drive that I want to re-purpose from win-dose. When I connect it, my file manager shows the file system label, but it is not mounted. If I try to force a mount, no joy.

I've run testdisk and I get a clean scan and viable partition table.

When I try to run gparted it scans forever without finding something satisfying to chew on.

Is there some black magic to working with external, USB-connected drives that is different from the same drive connected internally?

Oh, the existing partition is NTFS and win-dose won't read it either. I suppose the hardware could actually be dead, but then why did testdisk appear to work okay?

At a loss,
~~~ 8d;-/ Dan

[viking777]

If windows won't read it then you need to run chkdsk from windows to see what is wrong with the disk or else use gparted to reformat it to a Linux file system if you intend to use it solely on Linux from now on (of course the latter will wipe out any data it contains).