external USB failure to mount / read

[stephanwintner]

Hello

Got a drive out of a WD MyBook Live. Bricked, trying to recover data. Bolted it into an external USB housing, Linux can't see the drive.

stephan@Ursula ~ $ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 03f0:231d Hewlett-Packard Broadcom 2070 Bluetooth Combo
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0408:03ba Quanta Computer, Inc.
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 138a:0005 Validity Sensors, Inc. VFS301 Fingerprint Reader
Bus 002 Device 009: ID 174c:1153 ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM2115 SATA 6Gb/s bridge
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
stephan@Ursula ~ $

So device 009 seems to be the USB drive (goes away if I turn it off) but
stephan@Ursula ~ $ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for stephan:

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00037676

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 960016383 480007168 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 960018430 976771071 8376321 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 960018432 976771071 8376320 82 Linux swap / Solaris
stephan@Ursula ~ $

SDA1 is my internal drive. So the external drive isn't recognized as a drive, it's not available to mount. ???

I had the drive mounted in a WD EX2 NAS, and it claimed the drive was healthy. It would not mount it (block size issue, due to MBL using a PPC processor, yay) but claimed it was healthy.

Help please ! I did spend time searching but didn't find anything that seemed right...

Thanks
Stephan

[stephanwintner]

and solved. By connecting to a Windows machine. Worked fine, no issues. installed a driver and away we go.

Once upon a time Linux was better than Windows....

[Petermint]

ASMedia chips tend to work in Linux better than the other brands. There are problems with settings in BIOSes and the way you mount disks.

What does your BIOS say disks are AHCI, SATA or IDE? Some disk controller drivers only work one way in Linux. The Windows version of the driver is more flexible.

Some disks work in Linux if plugged in before boot but not after boot. This is a weird problem related to USB.

For some USB devices, there were differences between LM 17, 17.3, and 18. I had some that worked in one version of LM 17 but not 18 and, according to other posts, not in some versions of LM 17. Which version are you using?

[stephanwintner]

Internal is SATA, as is the external drive, via USB 3.0.

I am on LM 17.3, have been for a while. Keep upgrading stuff, trying to get stuff like this to work - so it's probably got a few packages that aren't from totally clean install of 17.3.

Stephan

[Petermint]

Hello Stephan, the reference to AHCI, SATA, or IDE in the BIOS. That is a setting. Your BIOS can run SATA chips in AHCI mode or emulate an older mode. Windows works with both. Some Linux/disk mixtures work with only one setting. If you have a chance to look in your BIOS, please lookup the setting.

[FransH]

I had the same problem with Mint 17.2.

I found on the internet that the issues was the missing exfat driver.

I installed it using:

sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

That did the job. Works fine now.

By the way it did work without any action under mint 18.