External Hard drive problem

[Karl Larsen]

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.
>               Thanks
>               Linda
>
>
>   
    Hard to tell what happened to your hard drive. Assume the drive is 
fine but the format is ruined. Do this:

1. Plug in the external hard drive and find out what it's address is on 
your computer. On mine it is /media/drive/, but may be anything on 
yours. When you get the proper address write it down.

2. Now you need to dis-mount the external and that is done by right 
clicking the image on the desktop.


3. Now do this in a terminal:

$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /media/drive

It will complete and should say it was successful.

Now you can use it again.

    If the HD is broken get a new one and do 1.,2.,3. on it.

Karl


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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