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Frank Barcenas
Asked: 2016-11-24 08:43:38 +0800 CST

External Hard drive no longer registering as a block device. What can be done?

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I have 1tb external drive that connects to my media server in my kids room. One day the XBMCBUNTU(xenial) running on the media server decided it no longer wanted to communicate with that drive. It does not even show up with 'fdisk -l', however, if I unplug it from the media center and plug into my MAC running PARAGON EXTFS I can see the partition and the kids movies and play them without a problem.

Is there anything that I could use to make the drive show up in fdisk so that I can mount it? or is there a config file that controls how drives are enumerated that maybe got corrupted or something? or is there something that can diagnose problems with my MBR?

disk

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This is a hardware failure. When you get the drive recognized backup all important data with whatever method you desire so that you can replace the drive. (Personally I would recommend rsync for this task in this case as you likely have it on both your Mac and your Xenial installations and will be able to immediately begin when you get the drive recognized. I would avoid dd in this case because you would need to read every sector to get a successful image and you are better off recovering some data than no data. Based on your recent comments there is likely a bad solder joint somewhere that is interfering with your ability to access the drive when it's warm. It's rare, but I've seen it before.

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