External HDD is corrupted

[Agent_M]

I know this is an old topic / thread, but this is the only place I have found
where someone is having the exact same problem I am.

I have a 1TB WD drive ( connected via a USB enclosure ), which was encrypted
using truecrypt. at some point I noticed there was an issue with the
reported "free space", long story short, I lost the partition, which isn't a
big deal as its my back up drive, and I have all the data elsewhere (
although currently not backed up, obviously). 

I tried re-encrypting with truecrypt, but it failed at the very end, so I
decided to forget the encryption and just format the drive. Unfortunately
regardless of whether I used ext2, ext3, ext4, or NTFS it failed, and I even
had issues just creating the MBR. I don't have the exact errors that I got
for that drive but could plug it in and screenshot them if needed. I do
recall some input/output errors though. 

So I thought the drive possibly had died ( its only a couple of years old
and hasn't been used much ).
So I bought a new 1TB Seagate, and put it in the USB enclosure.

I tried encrypting with Truecrypt again, and again it failed at the very
end. So again I decided to just format, and again it got delay error
messages and really didn't format it. I was trying all this with "Disk
Utility", so thought I would try GParted instead, and again had problems,
and wouldn't format properly.

I tried using a windows xp VM to format it, which it did no problem, could
copy files to it fine, but then when I connected it to Ubuntu ( 12.04 ), it
may read it ok the first time, but if I disconnect and reconnect bang,
partition was gone.

I then tried on a netbook with an install of windows 7 ( not a VM ). Again,
I could format it, write to it, unplug it, plug it back in again, and all
was fine...Until I plug it in to the Ubuntu Laptop, it would see it fine,
even disconnected and reconnected it, and could still see the files, tried
writing files to the drive using nautilus, and no problem, but then if I
disconnect it, and reconnect it to either the ubuntu or win7 PC the
partition is gone, and comes up as RAW, and prompting me to format it ( the
same as Farrukh Ali ).

So I thought maybe it is something with my Ubuntu installation, so again I
formatted the drive in windows 7, copied a couple of files onto it,
unplugged the drive and re-connected it a couple of times to make sure it
was fine, then rebooted the netbook and booted up off of a ubuntu 12.04
flash drive, connected the drive, and the same thing happened, so I don't
think it is my installation of Ubuntu.

I have downloaded and ran seatools for windows ( long test and DST ), and it
passes the test no problem.

I have done chkdsk /f <drive letter>: a couple of times, one time it did fix
some errors, but the drive still had the same issue.

I also ran a full chkdsk scan to check for bad sectors, and it found no
problems.

I have 2 USB enclosures that I have just recently bought, and have tried
both of them, and it makes no difference.

Everytime I plug it into Ubuntu and write data it will loose the partition.
I have never come across a problem like this before and it seems quite
bizarre, 2 drives, 1 old, 1 new doing the exact same thing.

I would normally try connecting directly to SATA in a desktop PC to see what
happens, but am away for an extended time in Africa, and don't have access
to a desktop PC at the moment.

Any help at all would be apprectiated.

I have included 2 images below, the cropped one is from the Ubuntu Laptop,
the uncropped one is from the netbook running Ubuntu just through a flash
drive.

<http://ubuntu.5.x6.nabble.com/file/n5061660/03-cropped.png> 

<http://ubuntu.5.x6.nabble.com/file/n5061660/42.png> 

In windows as mentioned before it just shows up as RAW in computer
management and prompts you to format.





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