[PLUG] Messed up USB drive

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Thu May 10 22:51:51 UTC 2012


I have an ancient 160 GB USB 2.0 drive that I use to hold movies. I
have too many movies, so today I bought a 3 TB USB 3.0 drive for $140
from Office Depot. This is the Seagate GoFlex Desk that has a lot of bad
reviews re reliability, and has only a two-year warranty. OK, I'm a
gambler. :)

The old drive had one ext3 or ext4 partition (forget which), labeled
"Movies." Foolishly, I did not unmount the old drive before plugging in
and formatting the new drive. The new drive came with NTFS/HPFS and a
bunch of Seagate Windows software. I used Palimpsest to delete the
partition, created a new partition, formatted it ext4, and gave it the
label "Movies." I think that last step was my undoing.

After doing the last step I realized that having two drives labeled
"Movies" would confuse my computer, so I changed the label on the new
drive to "Movies2." My intention was to move all the stuff from the old
drive to the new one, then unplug the old drive and relabel the new
drive "Movies." Some of the movies are being seeded as torrents, so I
was hoping that with a drive labeled "Movies" my bittorrent client
would just see all the files and carry on as though nothing happened.
OK, I'm also an optimist.

At this point the new drive works perfectly, although I can't take
advantage of its USB 3.0 interface because everything I have is only
USB 2.0. However, the old drive will not mount. In addition to my
Fedora 16 laptop (with mini-dick) I have a Lucid desktop. If I plug it
into either computer it does not appear in any GUI file manager. If I
launch Gparted it just goes "Scanning all devices ..." endlessly. The
computers work fine otherwise. And, while Gparted is scanning, if I
unplug the USB cable, it stops scanning and shows the other drives on
the computer. 

It's possible the old drive just gave up the ghost coincidentally with
today's activities. More likely I have messed it up somehow. I need
some suggestions for ways to diagnose the problem. 



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