External drive not being recognized

Question

I am currently running elementary OS (a Linux OS based on Ubuntu so everything in Ubuntu works in it) - dual booting it with Windows 8.

I have a 3TB external hard drive (USB 3.0) that does not seem to be recognized when I plug it in. It works fine under Windows (both 7 and 8).

It is using a GPT partition table and is formatted as NTFS.

When I plug it in, the light flashes on the drive but it doesn't show up under devices, if I run fdisk or gdisk they just seem to freeze.

Using dmesg I can see this:

[ 1511.173737] usb 4-2: new SuperSpeed USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd
[ 1511.198057] scsi11 : usb-storage 4-2:1.0
[ 1512.198085] scsi 11:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ST3000DM 001-9YN166       CC4C PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[ 1512.199618] sd 11:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[ 1512.199836] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
[ 1512.200003] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc] 5860533168 512-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB)
[ 1512.200904] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
[ 1512.200915] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[ 1512.201913] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page present
[ 1512.201926] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1512.202655] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
[ 1512.204294] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page present
[ 1512.204306] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1543.300083] usb 4-2: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd
[ 1543.318785] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8801cb1ec480
[ 1543.318797] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8801cb1ec4c0
[ 1574.366771] usb 4-2: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd
[ 1574.385450] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8801cb1ec480
[ 1574.385454] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8801cb1ec4c0

and a bit later on:

[ 1698.142961] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc] Unhandled error code
[ 1698.142972] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc]  Result: hostbyte=DID_ABORT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[ 1698.142980] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
[ 1698.143000] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 0
[ 1698.143009] Buffer I/O error on device sdc, logical block 0

I have tried the drive in USB 2 ports as well but have the same issue and I can't really seem to find any relevant answers researching the output of dmesg so any help is greatly appreciated.

Anyone have any ideas as to why it won't show up or what to try?

Solution

Check your kernel version to make sure that it supports reading and writing to drives with 4KB sectors. Newer drives with capacities measured in the TB range have changed from the old standard of 512B sectors to 4KB sectors. I believe you need to be on kernel 2.6.31 or greater. Windows 7 and 8 both support 4KB sectors natively which is why the drive probably worked on those OSs when you tested it.

After looking at your output again, it looks like your drive uses 512B sectors or emulates their use since line 6 of your output mentions a block size of 512B. Because they are logical blocks, it could still be using 4KB blocks behind the scenes. Now I'm thinking it might be a driver issue.

Some troubleshooting steps you might try are the following:

-If the USB HDD adapter is user serviceable, try putting a smaller drive in the USB enclosure and confirm that you can mount and access the drive. This will at least confirm that driver are loading. -Using the 3TB drive, check to see if it still sees the device on the USB bus. Run the following commands and look for your USB enclosure in the output. I provided several since I'm not familiar with your distro.

# lsusb;
# lshw;
# lshal;
# lspci;

-You mentioned that the drive is not present in devices. Does that mean there is no entry or file present when you run the following command?

# ls /dev/sdc;

-If there is a file/device present when you run the above command, can you paste the output from the following command?

# hdparm -I /dev/sdc;

Comments

[Michael Yasumoto]

Myles, I updated the answer.