Hi. I would appreciate some advice on this problem.
I have a Maxtor OneTouch II USB external hard disk drive, which recently starting giving the blinking error code. It’s out of warranty. The power supply is fine, and I can hear the disk spinning.
Prior to the blinking code, there were no SMART warnings, but automounting stopped working. For a few days, I mounted the drive manually, then the blinking code started. lsusb and YaST System information showed it was no longer being detected.
Seagate Support has been helpful so far, but I’ve now got to look for Linux diagnostics to test if the drive is working. Maxtor / Seagate’s diagnostic tools are for Windows only.
They suggest opening the caddy and testing the disk. Has anyone got any ideas on how to test the drive if it’s not detected?
The computer repair shop requires $44 to test the drive, and $77 to put it in a new caddy - but I only paid $36 for the drive (bargain).
Thanks in advance for any advice,
Kelly
Seagate used to have a bootable cd and a set of bootable floppy tools for repairing hard drives, but I’m not sure they have the drivers for usb devices. In any event, if the drive is formated in ext3 most likely those tools wouldn’t support it anyway.
Testdisk and photorec might be a way to at least recover some of the data, you’d have to read about their abilities since the filesystem is not mountable.
Good luck, I’ve been there myself and it’s not a good place to be.
Hi, you can’t get SMART information from a USB drive. I don’t like that, too.
For a few days, I mounted the drive manually, then the blinking code started.
Did you get any useful output when you mounted it in the commandline? Maybe something about a broken ntfs filesystem the last time you tried mounting?
They suggest opening the caddy and testing the disk. Has anyone got any ideas on how to test the drive if it’s not detected?
I’d do the same. Of course, I’d try to mount the disk on another computer and a different OS before.
Open the case and connect the external drive to IDE or SATA. Then use “fdisk -l” to see where your disk is and run a long test with smartmontools on the drive. That may take a long time but in the end you will have the disk’s “health status”. If the disk is broken you can use dd to copy the drive/partition to an imagefile for subsequent data recovery. If the drive is not detected at all, not via yast, lsusb/lspci or whatever, hmm, I don’t have any idea right now. Good luck!