Originally posted in the linux community but wanted to expand my results a bit. Hopefully this isnt considered tech support since the problem is already solved and I just want information. (Copy & pasted) Still new to linux hope its ok to ask here. I decided to replace one of my backup drives for the first time in 5ish years with a new 2.5" HDD meant for internal use but in an enclosure (the enclosure works fine). I formatted it in ntfs via gparted and everything went as expected, I even created a large veracrypt container file. I safely removed the drive and after a few hours I re-connected it and it made the notification noise that indicates the drive was detected but it’s filesystem wasn’t mounted. It showed up in gparted, disks and lsblk (as sdb1). Searched online and learned to manually mount it in the /mnt/ directory but I didnt want to manually do that everytime. I ended up reformatting it and for good measure, connected to another port and boom it mounted once connected. Decided not to create the file container or even incorporate the drive into my backup strategy yet until I get input whether or not this is a hardware issue or software. So what do you guys think happened? Not sure what info to provide.
Edit: the filesystem and encryption software I chose is for compatibility between my devices and both machines have the proper software to support that filesystem
Edit 2: new errors relating to my hardware started showing up when further proceeding with my plan so I’m just going to return it and try again
If you could mount it with the mount command, the drive is likely physically fine. My guess would be that something in PopOS didn’t mount the filesystem correctly. I’m not sure how PopOS handles automatically mounting drives. If it were a drive that was always connected, you could tell PopOS to mount it on every boot by putting the correct line in /etc/fstab
Linux is very picky when it comes to attached storage. Seeing as it’s an external drive, especially when it comes to ntfs, something linux will usually refuse to automount if the filesystem is detected as not being clean. Clean in this context means that it was unmounted properly last time it was use.
When a filesystem is mounted, a flag is set. This flag is then unset upon a proper unmount. When you yank the drive without unmounting first, this flag will remain, and the filesystem will therefore be considered as unclean, and will require manual intervention. This is a feature that has the potential to prevent dataloss if there are worse things at play.
Try to plug in the drive and run dmesg - It might tell you if an unclean filesystem was detected, or any other issues.
An unclean filesystem is usually fixed by running fsck.
Yeah started getting some hardware issues relating to the drive, some audible noises and whatnot. I blame the lack of packaging the seller used, but if I run into some trouble I’ll use the commands you gave me. Thank you for your help
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