New 2tb external hard drive not recognized(RESOLVED)

[digger44]

Sorry but I couldn't find an answer in search. I just bought a 2tb Seagate Backup Plus Slim. When I attach the usb it is not detected on my Lenovo Z580 laptop with 19.1 Linux Mint. It lights up and I can hear a hum. It is not seen in Disks and when I start up gParted the app sort of blanks out and the blue bar just goes back and forth but never sees it. However if I open Veracrypt and go to select device it sees it as 1.8tb device. Any help would be appreciated. Enclosed is result of lshw command.

[hglee]

However if I open Veracrypt and go to select device it sees it as 1.8tb device

VeraCrypt, a fork of TrueCrypt, can create hidden volumes.

Depending on how it was set up, there can be a hidden volume inside a visible but encrypted volume, each with its own password.

Methinks this is a software problem.

[digger44]

Thanks for the reply hglee. I understand that this may be a software issue, but this is a new hard drive right out of the box and it is not seen by my laptop. I don't know if this is a driver issue or something else. The fact that it is seen in Veracrypt but not in Disks or even registered in gParted (which really won't even open but does see my other drives when Seagate is removed) puzzles me and since I am not great at understanding more advanced technology leaves me confused as to what to do.

[Dark Owl]

Have you tested the drive on another (Windows!) computer? There is a possibility it is faulty. Another possibility is your USB port can't supply enough current to run the drive properly.

PS: 1.8TiB is correct for a "2TB" HDD.

[digger44]

Thank you Dark Owl. I will test it using a powered port and on a windows machine. I'll get back in a day or so.

[Dark Owl]

As it happens, I connected a small HDD in a USB caddy to my Linux PC over the weekend, and it wasn't recognised until I plugged it into a USB3 port. No, it is't USB3 capable!

Possible reasons for this include USB3 having a higher power output capacity, or just the fact of reconnecting the drive triggered it to be recognised by the OS.

[digger44]

Hi Dark Owl. I connected it to a new windows machine. It recognized it so I formated it to NTSC. I checked it out on my Linux machine and it still didn't recognize it. So went back to the windows machine and downloaded a program called Rufus that can supply a large Fat32 format. I tried to format it but it failed. Now the HD is seen by neither machine. It still spins up and the light in the Seagate is working. f anyone has any other ideas I'm willing to try. I am going to take it to a neighbor who works on computers to see if he can figure it out. I will get back here after.

[gittiest personITW]

Hi,
Just to check a couple of things.

When the 2Tb drive is plugged in to the Windows computer, does it show up in Disk Management?
Does either drive show up if you plug it into Live Mint? If not, where are you looking? (Terminal comands/apps etc)
Are you using a hub or is it/they directly connected?
What cable are you using - this sometimes is the route of all evil - a slightly dodgy intermittent connection.
Can you post the output to:

Code: Select all

inxi -Fxz

[digger44]

Thank you gittiest personITW for your reply.I used a second cable from a Seagate external usb drive that is recognized in my computer. It did not show the drive as being recognized except in Veracrypt where it did detect it but I was still unable to process anything in that app. I connected this cable to the windows machine and it did recognize the HD but said that it needed to be formatted, I tried both formats available: exFat and NTFS and it said that it was unable to format it. I went to Device Manager and it said that the device was working properly. inxi -Fxz frile is attached

[gittiest personITW]

If you are resigned to having lost any data on the drive, one of the best tools I used was this one (in Windows):
https://www.minitool.com/partition-manager/

If that doesn't work, you might want to try DBAN which is a boot disk wiper (just to see if you can clear any non-hardware problems) - but ALL DRIVES ATTACHED AT THE TIME WILL BE WIPED (sorry for screaming hysterically).

[Larry78723]

Looking at the inxi report,

Drives:
Local Storage: total: 2.73 TiB used: 506.95 GiB (18.1%)
ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Western Digital model: WD10SPZX-80Z10T1
size: 931.51 GiB
ID-2: /dev/sdb model: Expansion size: 1.82 TiB

I've never seen a SATA drive shown that way. Can you post a picture of the label on the drive?

[_tab]

Can Linux see a drive of that size without being formatted? Remember reading something on particular file systems for larger drives although this may be just for Windows.

[Dark Owl]

Can Linux see a drive of that size without being formatted? Remember reading something on particular file systems for larger drives although this may be just for Windows.

To explain:

A drive won't mount into an operating system without being partitioned and formatted suitably for that operating system, but a partition managing tool should be able to see a raw drive regardless of formatting (but see below re partitioning). If it doesn't, there is a hardware problem or incompatibility (eg SATA1 v. SATA2).

A disk format is (effectively) a database structure, providing the indexing necessary for the operating system to find empty space on a HDD, allocate space to a new file, and locate that file again later. The database structure has to store pointers to the resources, and the more resources there are the larger the pointers might have to be, so it is inefficient to reserve space for a large number of potentially large pointers when you only have a small drive (as was the case in the early days). Thus old formats are limited in the size and number of files that can be accommodated: eg FAT32 is limited to 4GiB file size max, FAT16 was limited in the number of files to 65k. Modern formats such as Ext4 and NTFS have limits so high to be effectively unlimited except by the size of the HDD.

Windows is restricted (unless you add third-party tools) in the range of formats it can use: FAT, exFAT, NTFS - ie not including the "normal" Linux formats Ext3/Ext4 (Microsoft have a "not invented here" attitude, including their long resistance to PDF preferring their own proprietary XPS). Incidentally, NTFS is proprietary to Microsoft, and third-party support for NTFS is essentially a hack.

Finally, there are limits imposed by the type of partitioning used on the HDD - and that is what I think you are talking about. The partition table has a fixed data width for entries which specify the start position and size of each partition on the HDD, in terms of clusters or blocks, each block comprising a number of sectors. Old drives had to specify in terms of surface, cylinder, and sector - but modern drives use logical block addressing which treats the whole drive as just a sea of blocks regardless of where it is physically located, and enables the manufacturer to map out defective sectors.

It is possible to adjust the figures by specifying a non-standard block size, but under normal circumstances the maximum size of HDD the MBR partition table can support is 2TiB. You can use an MBR partition table on a drive physically larger than 2TiB, but only the first 2TiB will be available for use. The GPT partition table offers much larger data fields, and there is no practical limit of the size of HDD under GPT. HOWEVER, the partitioning tool must be GPT-capable (GParted is, current versions of Windows are) otherwise it will wreck the data on a GPT drive by treating it as MBR (it will probably complain there is no partition table and would you like to create one).

MBR and GPT are disk partitioning schemes, separate from the formatting. A disk doesn't need to be partitioned, it could be formatted without partitioning (as if it were a single partition), but typically operating systems expect the partitioning layer to be there underneath the formatting - and then there can be multiple partitions on one physical disk, each formatted separately (or even subdivided into further partitions).

Why this gradual development of more capable disk partitioning and formatting? Because when drives were measured in megabytes, and computers had limited memory and processing power, having partitioning and formatting capable of supporting multi-terabytes would have imposed a huge and unnecessary overhead on storage space and processing. The limits have been expanded only when necessary, and new partitioning and formatting schemes require revisions to operating systems and tools.

It is also worth noting that trying to mount a non-Windows formatted storage device on a WIndows machine (particularly Win10), just by plugging it in, has been known to corrupt the device (Windows tries to write a tracking file even though the format is unrecognised).

[digger44]

Thank you for your explanation of drives and formatting. I really have no idea why Gparted continues to attempt to access the hard drive, but never makes it just running it's bar back and forth. I am pretty close to giving up on this. Are you aware if I opened the box is it possible that there is a unit inside that can be placed into another container and the problem is the electronics of the Seagate container? I may be showing my ignorance of this unit but it is all I can think of at this time.

[digger44]

If you are resigned to having lost any data on the drive, one of the best tools I used was this one (in Windows):
https://www.minitool.com/partition-manager/

If that doesn't work, you might want to try DBAN which is a boot disk wiper (just to see if you can clear any non-hardware problems) - but ALL DRIVES ATTACHED AT THE TIME WILL BE WIPED (sorry for screaming hysterically).

Thank you for your response. I will try that on my windows machine.

[Dark Owl]

Are you aware if I opened the box is it possible that there is a unit inside that can be placed into another container and the problem is the electronics of the Seagate container?

Indeed there is. A "portable" USB HDD is just an ordinary 2.5" SATA HDD in a box with a USB-SATA adapter. 2.5" HDDs only require 5V, so can run from USB. If you have another caddy or USB-SATA adapter cable, or can fit the drive into a PC, it should work (if it's going to).

[_tab]

Can Linux see a drive of that size without being formatted? Remember reading something on particular file systems for larger drives although this may be just for Windows.

To explain:

A drive won't mount into an operating system without being partitioned and formatted suitably for that operating system, but a partition managing tool should be able to see a raw drive regardless of formatting (but see below re partitioning). If it doesn't, there is a hardware problem or incompatibility (eg SATA1 v. SATA2).

A disk format is (effectively) a database structure, providing the indexing necessary for the operating system to find empty space on a HDD, allocate space to a new file, and locate that file again later. The database structure has to store pointers to the resources, and the more resources there are the larger the pointers might have to be, so it is inefficient to reserve space for a large number of potentially large pointers when you only have a small drive (as was the case in the early days). Thus old formats are limited in the size and number of files that can be accommodated: eg FAT32 is limited to 4GiB file size max, FAT16 was limited in the number of files to 65k. Modern formats such as Ext4 and NTFS have limits so high to be effectively unlimited except by the size of the HDD.

Windows is restricted (unless you add third-party tools) in the range of formats it can use: FAT, exFAT, NTFS - ie not including the "normal" Linux formats Ext3/Ext4 (Microsoft have a "not invented here" attitude, including their long resistance to PDF preferring their own proprietary XPS). Incidentally, NTFS is proprietary to Microsoft, and third-party support for NTFS is essentially a hack.

Finally, there are limits imposed by the type of partitioning used on the HDD - and that is what I think you are talking about. The partition table has a fixed data width for entries which specify the start position and size of each partition on the HDD, in terms of clusters or blocks, each block comprising a number of sectors. Old drives had to specify in terms of surface, cylinder, and sector - but modern drives use logical block addressing which treats the whole drive as just a sea of blocks regardless of where it is physically located, and enables the manufacturer to map out defective sectors.

It is possible to adjust the figures by specifying a non-standard block size, but under normal circumstances the maximum size of HDD the MBR partition table can support is 2TiB. You can use an MBR partition table on a drive physically larger than 2TiB, but only the first 2TiB will be available for use. The GPT partition table offers much larger data fields, and there is no practical limit of the size of HDD under GPT. HOWEVER, the partitioning tool must be GPT-capable (GParted is, current versions of Windows are) otherwise it will wreck the data on a GPT drive by treating it as MBR (it will probably complain there is no partition table and would you like to create one).

MBR and GPT are disk partitioning schemes, separate from the formatting. A disk doesn't need to be partitioned, it could be formatted without partitioning (as if it were a single partition), but typically operating systems expect the partitioning layer to be there underneath the formatting - and then there can be multiple partitions on one physical disk, each formatted separately (or even subdivided into further partitions).

Why this gradual development of more capable disk partitioning and formatting? Because when drives were measured in megabytes, and computers had limited memory and processing power, having partitioning and formatting capable of supporting multi-terabytes would have imposed a huge and unnecessary overhead on storage space and processing. The limits have been expanded only when necessary, and new partitioning and formatting schemes require revisions to operating systems and tools.

It is also worth noting that trying to mount a non-Windows formatted storage device on a WIndows machine (particularly Win10), just by plugging it in, has been known to corrupt the device (Windows tries to write a tracking file even though the format is unrecognised).

Thanks for the detailed reply.

[kato181]

With the drive connected, in Terminal copy & paste the following command and post the results back here in between the code display brackets </> You will see the code display icon above the text box.
lsusb

[digger44]

Thank you tab and kato181. I apologive for the long delay in replying but I have been sick and hospitalized. Luckily not Covid, but bad enough.
Here is the info that keto181 requested:

foobar@foobar-Lenovo-Z580:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0489:e042 Foxconn / Hon Hai Broadcom BCM20702 Bluetooth
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:0139 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTS5139 Card Reader Controller
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0000:3825
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 1f75:0621 Innostor Technology Corporation
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 04f2:b2e1 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 1a2c:2c27 China Resource Semico Co., Ltd
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

[kato181]

It's not showing your Seagate drive at all. Try another usb port and see what happens.
Does your laptop have problems reading any usb device? If you have access to another computer try it in that. Also check you bios to ensure that the usb port 3.0 detection is enabled. Some brands have it disabled.
Also check gparted to see if it detects the drive,if it does then the drive needs to be partitioned for it to be detected. Post back the results of gparted in the code display brackets. The 5th icon along above the text box.