help! An interesting (and worrying!) issue with one of my Hard Disks ... assistance needed!

[Unobscured Vision]

Maybe someone can help me get this figured out.

 

I have a SATA-connected Hard Disk, a Toshiba 320GB from a now-defunct Laptop. I am unable to set this hard disk to auto-mount in fstab, because if I do, the system cannot find it and halts with an error -- and then I need to load up recovery mode, remove the entry from fstab and then reboot. But I have no problem mounting the volume in Nemo after I'm loaded up -- no problems at all, no errors. It runs fine. In fact, I use it for storing VM files.

 

The really odd part -- Windows will not see the volume at all. No matter what I do, even in Disk Management and third-party Partition Managers, the volume does not appear at all. It's formatted NTFS -- I formatted it myself with gparted. The Hard Disk itself does not exist, according to Windows or my BIOS.

 

What's going on here?

[Haggis Veteran]

check the smart status on it?

[Unobscured Vision]

BIOS isn't even acknowledging its' existence. Might be the SATA Channel I've connected it to. The drive in question is on channel 3, and I know that this particular board refuses to boot from channels other than 1 & 2. It's an older ASUS board (top of the line when it was purchased in 2008), but it's got a fairly recent BIOS update (currently rev.1513), so I dunno.

 

No worries. I'm just going to add a command to mount the drive after I log in. I don't need the data accessible at the "bare-metal" fstab-level. I'm not going to be booting VBox Images as OS choices.

[simplezz]

Have you tried formatting as EXT4 and running a full check on it? That and what Haggis suggested. smartctl (smartctl --test=long /dev/sda) has some useful functions for testing drives.

 

As for mounting, are you identifying it with its UUID?

[Unobscured Vision]

9 minutes ago, simplezz said:

Have you tried formatting as EXT4 and running a full check on it? That and what Haggis suggested. smartctl (smartctl --test=long /dev/sda) has some useful functions for testing drives.

 

As for mounting, are you identifying it with its UUID?

a) No, formatted as NTFS to be Win32-readable. I suppose it won't hurt to format as ext4. I can certainly add the ext2/3/4 driver to Windows (if I ever install Windows again, which I likely will sometime down the road).

 

b) smartctl isn't a bad idea at all for anyone to be running. I'll do that this evening.  

 

c) No, identifying it by label. I know, I know. That's not the "suggested" way to do it.  

 

Let me finish making supper and I'll get busy.  

[Unobscured Vision]

Performed the scan using GSmartControl application. No errors found, the device reported old age/pre-failure but passed all tests. No bad sectors, no issues detected. Overall Health Assessment Test: Passed.

 

Hrmph. Well then. Guess it's ext4 format and relegated to VM Storage for that one after all. No worries.