SOLVED: External Seagate 500 GB USB hard drive will not mount

[Old-Polack]

Then this is not good.  It was partitioned with sda1 for swap, sda2 for root, and sda3 for userfiles. Where did the partitions go?
sdb is the external Seagate.
And why is the loss of power so destructive?

Something more than a simple loss of power is involved if entire partitions disappear, yet others remain. File systems can be destroyed within a partition, or a partition table can be destroyed, leaving the file systems intact, but then all partitions disappear. I would run testdisk on that hard drive to see if it can discover and repair the partition table. At this point you have nothing more to lose by trying, and just might find your data intact if you can get a proper partition table reestablished. You can run testdisk from the liveCD.

[sueharris59]

The computer was shut down properly last night. It booted up fine this morning. After about 20 minutes of reading my e-mail, I wanted to step away from the computer for a while, so I intended to turn off the Monitor button but instead hit the main power button on the Kensington Masterpiece Plus power control. When I tried to turn the computer back on, it wouldn't boot up again.

How do I use the testdisk command? are there any parameters I need to know? If that doesn't work, what else can I try?

[arjaybe]

Here's a step by step guide to run testdisk, with screen shots.  If your partitions are there then testdisk will find them and give you reasonable defaults.  Good luck.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

[sueharris59]

Thanks for pointing me to the documentation. 

fdisk -l is only recognizing 61.4 GB of the one disk that has the swap file (which it thinks is sda1, but is supposed to be sdb1).
It is not recognizing the 250 GB sda disk at all that has the boot (sda1) and user files (sda2) on it.

[pags]

Thanks for pointing me to the documentation. 

fdisk -l is only recognizing 61.4 GB of the one disk that has the swap file (which it thinks is sda1, but is supposed to be sdb1).
It is not recognizing the 250 GB sda disk at all that has the boot (sda1) and user files (sda2) on it.

Have you checked if the drive is recognized in the BIOS?  Are all the cables secure and correct (perhaps a loose cable coincided with the power issue [long-shot])?
Power may have also damage the controller (on-board, or add-in card?  Most are on-board now).
Could have also damaged the physical drive itself.

Start with the simple things.  Check the BIOS.  Remove and re-insert the drive (blow-out/clean connectors, etc).

Report back from there.

[sueharris59]

I'm in the BIOS setup utility. Where do I see if the drive is recognized?
The BIOS is American Megatrends.

Main

>SATA 1    : [Not Detected]
>SATA 2    : [Not Detected]
>SATA 3    : [Not Detected]
>SATA 4    : [Not Detected]


Which doesn't make sense if it can see the disk with the swap partition.

[pags]

I'm in the BIOS setup utility. Where do I see if the drive is recognized?
The BIOS is American Megatrends.

BIOS's vary from manufacturer to manufacture (and even different OEM versions from the same manufacturer), so there is no one single proper answer...

I'm just searching...
..Is this relevant to your BIOS?
http://www.ami.com/support/bios.cfm

There is also this:
http://www.computerhope.com/help/ami.htm

If this matches your BIOS (or is similar), then I would expect you would look here:
http://www.computerhope.com/help/ami.htm#04
for what drives are recognized by the BIOS (this is just checking that the drives are getting power and spinning up...once the BIOS hands the boot sequence to the kernel, it doesn't require the BIOS settings...)

I'm sorry I don't have access to an AMIBIOS offhand, and without the motherboard make/model (or PC, if it is an OEM unit), it's difficult to isolate where you need to look for this...

[sueharris59]

I dont' know what I did, exactly, but it works now!

I took your advice and opened the case to clean out the dust and check the data and power connections.
Then I turned on the power to see if the 250GB drive was even getting power.

I took out the Live CD just to see where it would go, and it started booting up. (my first thought was, "How is that possible?) I entered safe mode, (just in case), and ran testdisk (just in case). It saw the 250GB Drive! and the test results were ok, so I rebooted and it went right to my desktop!  YAY! What a welcome sight.
I shut down gracefully and rebooted again just to make sure. (I'm only a little neurotic.)

Thank you for all your advise.

Sue

[pags]

If you're happy with this solution (and everything is where you want it to be  ), then you should go back to your initial post and mark it as (SOLVED).

Glad you're back up and running.

[sueharris59]

Thanks.

I put SOLVED without the parens.  I guess there is a text limit for the subject line.