Dear All, Hope you are doing great. I ran into a very strange issue. I have a Dell T7500 machine that runs ubuntu 12. I have 8 different drives from different manufacturers of varying sizes with data on them. These 8 drives were hooked to this Dell machine using external docking stations. Now, we brought a Startech 8-bay enclosure. When I insert all these drives into the enclosure and plug it to the Dell machine, only the drive in the first slot works. If I put drive8 from slot8 into slot1, it mounts fine. But when I put it back to slot8 and drive1 in slot1, it doesn't popup. In this way, the 7 other slot drives show up as unknown volumes in disk utility. fdisk gives input/output error. parted gives unrecognized label error. But, when I plug this enclosure to a Ubuntu machine running 12 in another office, all 8 drives fire up and they all mount absolutely beautiful. I used/formatted/partitioned all these 8 drives using Ubuntu 10 on my machine. And then the enclosure was connected after an upgrade to 12. Please share any pointers. P.S.: No formatting is supposed to be done. Because, all drives have info on them.
What type of drives? SATA or SCSI?
What type of connection to the host? Cable or USB?
Hi hicksd8,
Those are all enterprise grade SATA drives.
I am connecting them using USB 3.0 interface.
Startech recommends that I use USB3.0 rather over SATA.
Right then, if the whole shooting match connects just fine to a different host then the two things to think about are:
- USB standards compatibility, is the failing host not fully USB 3.0 compliant, and
- Is the failing host incapable of supplying the required level of USB power.
First thing to try is to use a powered USB hub in between host and enclosure and see if that does it.
Hello again,
The hub didn't help with the mounting.
However, when I tried the SATA cable, all 8 drives came up and some of them had a yellow warning in the disk utility page saying misaligned by 3021 bytes. Please consider repartitioning.
But the drive accessibility was slow compared to USB 3.0
Any comments?
Was it a USB 3 hub that you tried?
Yes
Repartition the drive via gparted
What good would that do?
Well there may be a virus, a corruptuption or I don't know but repartitioning it and deleting the partition and repartitioning it or formating it might help but you will still lose files
A "virus" on the disk that would prevent it being detected on one host but not others? I don't think that makes sense, you seem to give computer viruses magical properties.
Blindly repartitioning without good reason is very bad advice, particularly on a disk that's malfunctioning!
A virus on the disk or a faulty USB could be a problem
Howe exactly would a "virus on the disk" cause the problem of it being visible to some hosts but not others? You don't seem to realize what a virus is, if you ascribe them the magical powers of interfering with computer hardware before even being run...
I do you [snip] I had one on my pc the other day you [snip] child ask this how does a virus get on your PC it saves an unwanted file into the computers HARD DRIVE and does what it wants to do from there
---------- Post updated at 04:49 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:47 PM ----------
And search the u3 USB that can run itself/programs on it automatically
The OP has said that the drives can be plugged into other machines and behave. If it was a virus then all other machines would be infected and none of them would behave.
Anyway, as Corona688 has already said, a virus needs to be executed to do any damage and if the drives aren't mounting (or even being seen by the hardware), no code is being read leave alone being executed.
Actually I hadntbread that bit but it just so happens there is a u3 usb that CAN execute files when plugged into a PC so go and do your homework mate
---------- Post updated at 05:06 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:06 PM ----------
Automatically
A quick look around the web seems to say that the Dell T7500 had issues with USB ports on lower BIOS versions. Therefore, my next question is what BIOS version have you got?
If it is incompatible what's he meant to do risk rendering his PC useless by flashing a new bios
Some popular models of flash drives contain an axillary device which prompts windows to install a U3 device driver which many consider to be malware. I am hoping you understand the difference between a flash drive and a hard drive toaster, Windows and Linux, malware and virus, device driver and hardware.
Your advice of "reformat" does not help this problem, or the thread.
Well I tried to help unlike you annoying people correcting everyone