[SOLVED] Hard Drives Doesn't Appear After Using Format/Partition Tools

[Ulfberht86]

Hi

I need help with saving my old drives:

I had several old hard drives, that I wanted to format from ntfs to ext4, when I was still using mint 17 on my primary pc (I'm now using LM 19)

I did some searching and most people seemed to like/recommend Gparted for format and partition tasks, so I decided to use that program.

I felt a bit unsure about the procedure, so I just went with standard settings, and thought everything would be fine, since I didn't have any problems formatting or partitioning when i was still on windows...

But the drives vanished from everywhere on the desktop and also in Gparted after the format, so i couldn't undo anything, since i couldn't select the drives...

I had a couple of drives left, so I went to my last machine with windows 7 on it, and used "Easeus Partition Wizard" to format the remaining drives, but the result were the same: The drives vanished...

There's nothing wrong with my ports, cables or anything else connected to the hard drives and they were all working just fine a couple of days earlier, when they were ntfs and connected to a windows machine, so I have no idea what could be the problem here...

I found a few posts around the web, written by people in a similar situation, but I'm afraid to mess up my drives even further, so i'd rather wait for a reply here.

By the way: I noticed a program called "Disks" in the start menu, on LM 19, and decided to use it to format one of my new 1TB Hybrid drives. It went through without any problems and I can see the drive. HIGHLY recommend other newbies to leave Gparted alone...

Hope my old drives can be saved, most of them are only 250GB drives, but 2 of them are pretty new and are 1TB drives (we are talking about 8 hard drives total!).

Thanks in advance for replying. GREATLY APPRECIATED!

[Lord Boltar]

On my external drives plugged in via USB I use the USB Stick Formatter that comes with Mint and format them to FAT32 or EXT4 once formatted just doulbe click the drive to mount. If you want to use the drives for a Windows machine as well I would use the FAT32

[gm10]

Let's get some information about your system first. Reboot, then run these commands and copy & paste the output into your next post, using code tags (the </> icon):

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inxi -Fxzp

and

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sudo fdisk -l

and

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lsblk -o +FSTYPE,UUID

[Ulfberht86]

Update:

Some of the drives (but not all of them) became visible in "Disks" on LM 19

Didn't think it would work on the old drives, since they didn't appeared in "Gparted" on LM 17 or in "Partition Wizard" on Win 7...

I'll try to connect the remaining drives and see if any them can be fixed with "Disks", and then I'll post a new update with the number of broken drives remaining and the info gm10 asked for

[Ulfberht86]

4 out of 8 drives are now working again thanks to the "Disk" program, but the remaining 4 won't work, so I'll paste the info:

inxi -Fxzp:

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System:    Host: ulfberht86-MS-7529 Kernel: 4.15.0-30-generic x86_64
           bits: 64 gcc: 7.3.0
           Desktop: Cinnamon 3.8.8 (Gtk 3.22.30-1ubuntu1)
           Distro: Linux Mint 19 Tara
Machine:   Device: desktop Mobo: MICRO-STAR model: G31TM-P35 (MS-7529) v: 1.0 serial: N/A
           BIOS: American Megatrends v: V4.0 date: 06/11/2009
CPU:       Dual core Pentium E5300 (-MCP-) 
           arch: Penryn rev.10 cache: 2048 KB
           flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 10398
           clock speeds: max: 2603 MHz 1: 2505 MHz 2: 2200 MHz
Graphics:  Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Cedar [Radeon HD 5000/6000/7350/8350 Series]
           bus-ID: 01:00.0
           Display Server: x11 (X.Org 1.19.6 )
           drivers: ati,radeon (unloaded: modesetting,fbdev,vesa)
           Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
           OpenGL: renderer: AMD CEDAR (DRM 2.50.0 / 4.15.0-30-generic, LLVM 6.0.0)
           version: 3.3 Mesa 18.0.5 Direct Render: Yes
Audio:     Card-1 Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Cedar HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5400/6300/7300 Series]
           driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 01:00.1
           Card-2 Intel NM10/ICH7 Family High Def. Audio Controller
           driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:1b.0
           Card-3 Blue Microphones Yeti Stereo Microphone
           driver: USB Audio usb-ID: 001-005
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k4.15.0-30-generic
Network:   Card: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCIE Gigabit Ethernet Controller
           driver: r8169 v: 2.3LK-NAPI port: e800 bus-ID: 03:00.0
           IF: enp3s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 1500.3GB (0.6% used)
           ID-1: /dev/sda model: WDC_WD5000AACS size: 500.1GB
           ID-2: USB /dev/sdf model: Elements_1042 size: 1000.2GB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 458G used: 8.9G (3%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda1
           ID-2: /media/ulfberht86/Ekstern size: 917G used: 72M (1%)
           fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sdf1
RAID:      No RAID devices: /proc/mdstat, md_mod kernel module present
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 39.0C mobo: N/A gpu: 62.0
           Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Info:      Processes: 190 Uptime: 1:39 Memory: 1558.6/3944.8MB
           Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Gcc sys: 7.3.0
           Client: Shell (bash 4.4.191) inxi: 2.3.56 

sudo fdisk -l:

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Disk /dev/sda: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 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
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xe48621cf

Device     Boot Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *     2048 976771071 976769024 465.8G 83 Linux

lsblk -o +FSTYPE,UUID:

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NAME MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT FSTYPE UUID
sda    8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk                   
└─sda1
       8:1    0 465.8G  0 part /          ext4   1b52b8e7-d81d-4ce8-aa16-46084688588c
sdf    8:80   0 931.5G  0 disk                   
└─sdf1
       8:81   0 931.5G  0 part /media/den ext4   6a650645-abbc-479b-b1ba-b4670054a97f
sr0   11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

When I typed

sudo fdisk -l

in the terminal, it didn't end with "$", so I think something prevents it from writing more info.
A few of the drives claim they are "busy", so maybe that has something to do with it.

[lazarus]

You haven't said how 'old' the old drives are. From your description, I suspect the drives are in a state of HW failure. Maybe the platters, maybe their on-board controllers.

So, I suggest ignoring the OS side of it for now - Well... as much as you can, given that you need the OS to run the tests! - and look at the HW,

If, in your BIOS, you have SMART enabled for the disks, you should be able to use smartctl to check the low-level HW states of the drives that it can access.

For ease of use, I'd suggest installing the GUI interface for it - gsmartctl - via SW Manager. It's less of a learning curve.

With as many unresponsive drives as you say, I estimate odds of about 1 in 3 that it will detect one or two of them as well, depending on whether their 'lack of response' is due failed formatting (confusing the heck outta the OS) or outright failure. (The drive literally can't respond.)

I'd also use it to re-examine the drives that you report were restored by the 'Disks' utility; for it to find drives that GParted doesn't... well... something is fishy there. Personally I'd have doubts about their integrity and wouldn't trust them for anything until they were closely scrutinised.

Depending on what is reported, you may be able to bring a couple back online. Or you may just discover that they're fine and something else has gone screwy... but at least you'd have eliminated one possible cause.

[Ulfberht86]

All drives are 2,5 sized and connect with sata cables, so they are fairly new, and they all worked up to when i formatted them. I doubt 4 drives get HW failure at the same time.

I want to use the old drives with the rest of my old hardware, so they will be connected to 2 old motherboards, which i doubt have "smart", but I'll take a second look

I Just read that Western Digital have something called "idle3". 3 of the broken drives are Western Digital, so could that be related to the problem

The 2 1TB drives are both a "WD Elements 1042"

[lazarus]

All drives are 2,5 sized and connect with sata cables, so they are fairly new, and they all worked up to when i formatted them. I doubt 4 drives get HW failure at the same time.

You might be surprised. You said they were running under a Win machine and I've seen HDDs slowly fail w/out being detected by Windows. I've also seen instances where Win detected a problem the User has ignored it and, because Win didn't repeat the advisory forgot about the problem altogether.

As a matter of fact, I'm looking at 2 such HDDs right now. (They're my paperweights.) They came out of Windows machines that "worked fine" until I formatted them. In Windows. Then they fell over in a big way and I had to explain to the customer that wasn't trying to screw them over.

I want to use the old drives with the rest of my old hardware, so they will be connected to 2 old motherboards, which i doubt have "smart", but I'll take a second look

SMART has been part of most BIOS's for... oh... well over a decade now. How old are your old mobos?

I Just read that Western Digital have something called "idle3". 3 of the broken drives are Western Digital, so could that be related to the problem

The idle3 timer sets the timeout before parking the heads. On some servers the default time is too short and the heads are moving so much that it physically wears out parts of the mechanism.

It could be your problem, I suppose. But if it is, then those drives are likely already toast. FWIW, you can check for this with the util I mentioned earlier...

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sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep "^193"

If the last value returned is >2000 they could probably benefit from a longer delay. Don't be too concerned if they're much higher... here's a report from a few of the WD10-EADS and WD10-EARS HDDs in my server:

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lazarus@Beelzebub ~ $ sudo su
Beelzebub lazarus # smartctl -A /dev/sdb | grep "^193"
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   198   198   000    Old_age   Always       -       8095
Beelzebub lazarus # smartctl -A /dev/sdc | grep "^193"
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       662461
Beelzebub lazarus # smartctl -A /dev/sdd | grep "^193"
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       788545
Beelzebub lazarus # smartctl -A /dev/sde | grep "^193"
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       951

As you can see, a couple of them are well over 600,000 load cycles! They're still OK, but I'm very aware that they're due for replacement soon.

[Ulfberht86]

It could be your problem, I suppose. But if it is, then those drives are likely already toast.

Yup, they are toast

Tried what you guys suggested and everything else I could think of, but I can't even make them appear in the terminal.

I consider them broken beyond repair at this point, and will prevent this from happening again by avoiding Gparted and Western Digital drives in the future.

4 out of 8 drives started working again after I used "Disks" so It's not all bad news!

I also learned some terminal magic from you guys, so that's cool

Thanks again for helping me out, I'll mark the post as solved