An interesting (and worrying!) issue with one of my Hard Disks ... assistance needed!


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Maybe someone can help me get this figured out.

 

I have a SATA-connected Hard Disk, a Toshiba 320GB from a now-defunct Laptop. I am unable to set this hard disk to auto-mount in fstab, because if I do, the system cannot find it and halts with an error -- and then I need to load up recovery mode, remove the entry from fstab and then reboot. But I have no problem mounting the volume in Nemo after I'm loaded up -- no problems at all, no errors. It runs fine. In fact, I use it for storing VM files.

 

The really odd part -- Windows will not see the volume at all. No matter what I do, even in Disk Management and third-party Partition Managers, the volume does not appear at all. It's formatted NTFS -- I formatted it myself with gparted. The Hard Disk itself does not exist, according to Windows or my BIOS.

 

What's going on here?

BIOS isn't even acknowledging its' existence. Might be the SATA Channel I've connected it to. The drive in question is on channel 3, and I know that this particular board refuses to boot from channels other than 1 & 2. It's an older ASUS board (top of the line when it was purchased in 2008), but it's got a fairly recent BIOS update (currently rev.1513), so I dunno.

 

No worries. I'm just going to add a command to mount the drive after I log in. I don't need the data accessible at the "bare-metal" fstab-level. I'm not going to be booting VBox Images as OS choices.

Have you tried formatting as EXT4 and running a full check on it? That and what Haggis suggested. smartctl (smartctl --test=long /dev/sda) has some useful functions for testing drives.

 

As for mounting, are you identifying it with its UUID?

9 minutes ago, simplezz said:

Have you tried formatting as EXT4 and running a full check on it? That and what Haggis suggested. smartctl (smartctl --test=long /dev/sda) has some useful functions for testing drives.

 

As for mounting, are you identifying it with its UUID?

a) No, formatted as NTFS to be Win32-readable. I suppose it won't hurt to format as ext4. I can certainly add the ext2/3/4 driver to Windows (if I ever install Windows again, which I likely will sometime down the road).

 

b) smartctl isn't a bad idea at all for anyone to be running. I'll do that this evening. :) 

 

c) No, identifying it by label. I know, I know. That's not the "suggested" way to do it. ;) 

 

Let me finish making supper and I'll get busy. :yes: 

Performed the scan using GSmartControl application. No errors found, the device reported old age/pre-failure but passed all tests. No bad sectors, no issues detected. Overall Health Assessment Test: Passed.

 

Hrmph. Well then. Guess it's ext4 format and relegated to VM Storage for that one after all. No worries. ;) 

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