External Hard Drive Is Not Recognized On Laptop

[just89daddy]

Dell Vostro - Originally had Vista Home Basic installed
Replaced Vista with Kubuntu 9.04 and upgraded to 10.04

My external hard drive is not being recognised. I have installed all the programs I can find that include NTFS or mount, but still doesn't even spin. sudo fdisk -l and device notifier both show only my 250GB internal hard drive.

My external has all my personal files on it, please someone help me. My external hdd came from an old laptop. It's a Hitachi Travelstar 40GB and it worked fine when plugged into a Windows OS

[Snowhog]

Re: External Hard Drive Is Not Recognized On Laptop

Two possibilities: 1) the USB port you are plugging into is dead; 2) the USB port you are plugging into doesn't provide enough power to drive the HD.

Do you have more than one USB port? If 'yes,' have you tried the other(s)?

[askrieger]

Re: External Hard Drive Is Not Recognized On Laptop

There seem to be a number of Dell Vostro computers, both laptops and desktops, with a variety of characteristics. In addition, most Dell computers, can be purchased with a number of different configuration options. Also, the Hitachi Travelstar appears to be a bare HD which requires some kind of interface hardware.If Snowhog's suggestion does not solve your problem, we're going to need more information.

[just89daddy]

Re: External Hard Drive Is Not Recognized On Laptop

i see the hdd in disk utility, and the drive nor the volume is recognized, and i cant seem to format it. i assume there bust be a driver or something i need...

[jglen490]

Re: External Hard Drive Is Not Recognized On Laptop

If you go to K->Settings->System Settings->Advanced->Removable Devices, what do you see?

On mine, I have "Enable Automatic Mounting of Removable Media" checked, along with the "Mount All Removable Media at Login" and "Automatically Mount Removable Media When Attached" buttons.

They show up under the /media directory in konsole and are automatically displayed in Dolphin after mount.