My external hard drive keeps unmounting and remounting itself

Question

I have a Seagate 500 GB desktop external drive. When I plug the drive in through USB 2.0, it immediately auto-mounts and functions for about 1 minute before unmounting itself. After a few more minutes it will auto-mount again and the process repeats.

Is my drive bad or is there any hope that I can get this to work?

Solution 1

Probably, this is related to USB Power Management Problems: not enough power on the USB. Then it is solved by:

• reduce the power consuming: make a static, horizontal position of your External Hard Drive;
• increase the power providing: use another usb port or another USB cabel;
• etc.

Solution 2

This happened to me when I plugged my external Seagate drive into what appeared to be a USB 3.0 port on the front of my case. Despite having a blue connector, apparently it was not actually a USB 3.0 port. I seem to have fixed the problem by plugging the drive into one of the real USB 3.0 ports on the back of my computer.

Solution 3

There have been some people using Mac OSX that have had similar problems (see here and here).

The solution that works for many of them (including me) was to just reformat the drive. Since your drive only stays mounted for a short time you will have to do the reformatting quickly.

You can do this with a tool such as gparted, but be careful you can lose data if you don't know what you are doing.

EDIT:
This worked for about a week. I have since taken the bare hard drive out of the case and placed it in this new enclosure. Things seem to be working so hopefully it was just a problem with the case.

Comments

[Admin]

Have you tried manually mounting the drive? Does the problem persist?

[Admin]

Mounting manually also quickly disconnected. I've since taken the hard drive out of it's original case and put it in a new enclosure. It has now been working flawlessly for about 2 months.

[Admin]

Ok thanks for the info, I've been having a similar issue.