08-02-2016, 06:50 PM
Thanks to all who have offered thoughts. I'll respond to the various comments in roughly the same order.
richtea - I think you may eventually be proved right. I'm ready for the possibility. But I want to try and check beyond doubt that the patient is definitely dead, and not just sleeping or hiding!
Jocklad - thanks for the link to that video, which I had in fact already seen as well as a lot of other clips all about various possible reasons for a drive's failure to show. In my particular situation, I have already disassembled the drive (the connections to the PCB were good); I have fitted the hard drive itself into another enclosure with a different PCB interface (and it still didn't show on screen); so I have reassembled it into its original casing again. I don't think there is a physical/connection issue.
Merlin - I haven't yet tried that command line route. But to be honest, I'm not optimistic that fdisk - l will reveal the drive (see below - I tried to do it via command line in Windows and got no joy). If it isn't listed, there's no point in going on to other commands.
trinidad - I understand what you are saying. In GParted, on the top right of the screen there is indeed a dropdown box which should list and show all drives. The problem is that it only shows the internal hard drive of my laptop (as /dev/sda - or what would be the 'C' drive in Windows). There is simply no listing for my portable external drive: so there is no disk name which I can click in order to highlight it and get details of the device. But I'd be interested if you could explain/clarify the matter of a disk path, and the significance of an SCSI-configured connection. Is this a clue as to where I should look, or what I could to, to track down the drive and make it "visible" on screen?
firenice03 - as mentioned above, the dropdown in upper right of GParted screen shows only internal/dev/sda. Clicking on the dropdown does not list any other drives/disks. This "invisible" portable disk hasn't been used: it is brand new, but will have some OEM Iomega software on it so should be initialised, formatted and maybe partitioned. My other - identical - Iomega portable drive certainly was ready to use out of the box and I have been using it successfully for years...
In fact although I did not mention all the details in my original post, when I plugged the drive into a Windows laptop, it said "found new hardware" but the drive did not appear in the My Computer screen. It did show up in Device Manager, but not in Disk Management. It was also listed in the "Safely Remove Hardware" popup. So I did exactly what you suggest: went into command-line, did diskpart and list disk. Only the internal laptop ("C") drive showed on the list. No sign of the external drive.
So I'm still baffled. How come in Windows this portable external drive is listed in Device Manager but not in Disk Management? How come in Linux Lite under System Info>Storage the drive shows up (with SCSI2 as controller), but is not seen - at all - in GParted?
I wonder what to try next - before consigning this un-used HDD to the bin....
richtea - I think you may eventually be proved right. I'm ready for the possibility. But I want to try and check beyond doubt that the patient is definitely dead, and not just sleeping or hiding!
Jocklad - thanks for the link to that video, which I had in fact already seen as well as a lot of other clips all about various possible reasons for a drive's failure to show. In my particular situation, I have already disassembled the drive (the connections to the PCB were good); I have fitted the hard drive itself into another enclosure with a different PCB interface (and it still didn't show on screen); so I have reassembled it into its original casing again. I don't think there is a physical/connection issue.
Merlin - I haven't yet tried that command line route. But to be honest, I'm not optimistic that fdisk - l will reveal the drive (see below - I tried to do it via command line in Windows and got no joy). If it isn't listed, there's no point in going on to other commands.
trinidad - I understand what you are saying. In GParted, on the top right of the screen there is indeed a dropdown box which should list and show all drives. The problem is that it only shows the internal hard drive of my laptop (as /dev/sda - or what would be the 'C' drive in Windows). There is simply no listing for my portable external drive: so there is no disk name which I can click in order to highlight it and get details of the device. But I'd be interested if you could explain/clarify the matter of a disk path, and the significance of an SCSI-configured connection. Is this a clue as to where I should look, or what I could to, to track down the drive and make it "visible" on screen?
firenice03 - as mentioned above, the dropdown in upper right of GParted screen shows only internal/dev/sda. Clicking on the dropdown does not list any other drives/disks. This "invisible" portable disk hasn't been used: it is brand new, but will have some OEM Iomega software on it so should be initialised, formatted and maybe partitioned. My other - identical - Iomega portable drive certainly was ready to use out of the box and I have been using it successfully for years...
In fact although I did not mention all the details in my original post, when I plugged the drive into a Windows laptop, it said "found new hardware" but the drive did not appear in the My Computer screen. It did show up in Device Manager, but not in Disk Management. It was also listed in the "Safely Remove Hardware" popup. So I did exactly what you suggest: went into command-line, did diskpart and list disk. Only the internal laptop ("C") drive showed on the list. No sign of the external drive.
So I'm still baffled. How come in Windows this portable external drive is listed in Device Manager but not in Disk Management? How come in Linux Lite under System Info>Storage the drive shows up (with SCSI2 as controller), but is not seen - at all - in GParted?
I wonder what to try next - before consigning this un-used HDD to the bin....