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11.04 will not recognise my data disc

Asked by John Brady

I have 3 HDD on my desktop computer. One for Ubuntu, one for XP, one for data storage. Ubuntu will not recognise the data disc.
If I format the data disc it is recognised for a while, but then disappears again. It cannot be seen in disc utility even though the xp disc is still recognised.

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Chris
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Best Chris (fabricator4) said : 		#1

Hi, what format is the data disk? ext4 would be best.

It might help to add the data disk to fstab, and you'll also be able to mount it to a give position in the filesystem, for example in your own home directory such as /home/username/data1.

You can get access to the ext4 disk from Windows by loading the ext2 driver in Windows. I have used and recommend the Ext2Fsd driver from sourceforge.

Try it and see:

1) format the data disk as ext4 if it is not already
2)give the partition a volume label, eg data1 (note: case sensitive in linux!)
3)add the partition to /etc/fstab

example line for /etc/fstab using the label to mount the partition instead of the UUID: (very rugged as any partition with that label will mount fine):

LABEL=data1 /home/username/data ext4 defaults 0 2

When you next reboot the data1 partition will now automount to /home/username/data, or to use the shortform: ~/data

I actually use this method to mount the SD card in my EeePC as /home, so if I want a completely new machine with my username I just change the SD card (with the same volume label) to the one I want and boot it up.

If you still have problems with the data disk dropping out after doing this setup, then it may be that you have some unresolved hardware issue.

Chris

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delance (olivier-delance) said : 		#2

Is the 3rd disk external or internal ? If it is a USB disk, use "lsusb" to check if it seen on USB bus.
Do you need to share disk between XP and Ubuntu ? In this case, the simpler is to format to NTFS, even if it exists ext4 driver for XP.

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John Brady (jb-brady) said : 		#3

Thanks Chris, that solved my question.

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John Brady (jb-brady) said : 		#4

Thanks to Chris and Olivier-delance.

It is an internal disk but I will get round it. By the way, Chris .. I'm very new to ubuntu so many thanks for the extra work !!!!!!!!! ha-ha.

JB XXXXXX