External Hard drive problem

[John K Masters]

On 12:45 Mon 05 May     , Linda Hanigan wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 18:11 +0100, John K Masters wrote:
> > On 11:54 Mon 05 May     , Linda Hanigan wrote:
> > > I am hoping someone can help me. I have a seagate 500gb external usb
> > > hard drive. It has a NTFS filessystem. I was backing up to it last week
> > > and caught the power cord so it was the equivalent of turning it off so
> > > it was not unmounted. Now the drive is not recognized by Windows or
> > > Linux. I tried doing mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/free. I tried
> > > using -o force. Can anyone help me it says it can't find a drive on sda1
> > > so I don't know if I can even reformat it.
> > > 
> > What do you get if you connect it to your Linux box and run:-
> > 
> > sudo fdisk -l
> > 
> > After connecting try:- dmesg
> > 
> > Does that show anything? I don't really know too much about NTFS but
> > hopefully you haven't damaged the actual drive
> > 
> fdisk -l only shows hda nothing for sda and there is nothing in dmesg it
> is like you didn't plug anything in.
>               Linda
> 
Just to eliminate the obvious, if the disk is mains powered does it spin
up when switched on? If it is powered through the USB port, have you
tried another cable?

Clutching at straws here :)

Regards, John
-- 
I wish I was young enough to know everything.