And Knoppix saved the day...

[daacosta]

A friend borrows my portable hard drive (SimpleTech) to back up some of his files. He returns the hard drive to me and... It refuses to automount on my Ubuntu laptop... I cry, I curse... The data inside my portable hard drive is very very very important to me and I can't think of anything I can do (I try to force it but...)

I boot from knoppix and then mount the portable hard drive and lo and behold a suspicious folder appears with the remaining contents intact... I erase the suspicious folder and try again to boot from Ubuntu and mount my portable hard drive...

It works, I am relieved, now I am happy

[SkittleLinux18]

I am super glad you got your data and HD back... but why in the world would you let someone borrow your portable hard drive??

Just a thought for next time.

[bigtomrodney]

I got back my portable drive from my Dad last night after a few months. It wouldn't automount at the start but after another attempt it did. I was reading the contents and it was slow when accessing particular files.

Thankfully in Linux you get lots of helpful messages in your logs/dmesg. Well I think that drive needs a formatting anyway! Plenty of errors. Let's just hope it was dirty unmounting and not a broken drive

[aluminumspleen]

hey daacosta, can i ask what suspicious folder you found? i also have a SimpleTech, and I havent been able to get it to mount in Ubuntu or Windows like it used to. I've searched high and low for a missing driver or something, but maybe this is the problem.