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External hard drive: unable to access it

MATTER -  
mamiemando Posted messages 33228 Registration date   Status Moderator Last intervention   -

Hello,

I have a Seagate Basic external hard drive connected to the computer via USB. After normal operation, it shows me the following message:

"Cannot access "Seagate Basic". Error mounting /dev/sdc1 at /media/matter/seagate Basic. Unknown error when mounting /dev/sdc1."

What can I do?


2 answers

  1.
    Super.Mario Posted messages 583 Registration date   Status Member Last intervention   251
     

    Hello

    Either your hard drive inside the enclosure is dead (not cool) and there’s not much you can do, it’s often too late!!
    Or the power supply has "become" (yes, it wears out...) too weak to power both the enclosure and the hard drive inside!! I believe it’s 12 volts 2Ah, it’s 3Ah for NAS...

    Try with a new power supply and if possible a more powerful one (3Ah or more if you can find it)...

    If that doesn’t work, the last solution is to take the hard drive out of the enclosure and connect it directly (to a tower with a Linux/Ubuntu system) and try to access it... But it’s probably locked!!

    See you later

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  2. mamiemando Posted messages 33228 Registration date   Status Moderator Last intervention   7 940
     

    Hello,

    Your error may be hardware-related (see #1), but that would be really unfortunate. More likely, the file system used for /dev/sdc1 is corrupted. This can happen if the drive wasn't "unmounted" properly.

    1) The fsck command (for file system check) can repair damaged file systems. Have you tried running the following command (the partition being checked must not be mounted):

    sudo fsck /dev/sdc1

    This solution does not lead to data loss per se, but some files (those corresponding to damaged inodes) may have been renamed and moved to the lost+found/ folder. This folder is then located at the root of the said file system (for example, /media/usb/lost+found if your drive is mounted at /media/usb).

    2) More extreme solution: you can try to format the affected partition (regardless of the operating system and software used), but be careful, the data stored there will be lost and the operation is irreversible.

    Good luck

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