I've been using am external hard drive for backing up files for a few years now. It connects via USB and works on my laptop that has a Ubuntu 16.04 install. But when I put the same hard drive in my new 19.10 installed laptop it does not recognise the hard drive. The light on the drive powers but nothing is recognised in either file manager or terminal. Other hard drives work fine on the computer, but not this particular one, which works fine everywhere else.
According to disks (on the other laptop) is it Partition type: basic data and Contents: NTFS.
I have typed in "ls /dev/ | grep sd" into terminal, but nothing new appears.
I have typed in "sudo fdisk -l" and I don't think I can see it there
I have typed in "sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g" and it says it is already installed.
I have looked on dmesg and there is no recognition of the hard drive
The strangest thing is that it randomly worked once after I tried to install ntfs-3g and restarted the computer. And then it stopped again. This happened twice after I installed ntfs-3g. After I did that and restarted, it worked, but then after I put the disk in another computer to load files, it stopped being recognised again. The only response is an electrical one which is the light on the hard drive going on.
This is really strange. The hard drive works fine everywhere else. Other hard drives work fine on this install/laptop. Can anyone suggest what is going wrong here?
Edit: Solution. Eventually I found that if I connected the hard drive to the USB hub, rather than directly to the machine, it would load the drive.
dmesgshortly after connecting the drive for any messages indicating that the kernel has detected the new device, what it's being detected as, which actions (mount or otherwise) have ensued, and whether any errors are being reported. – Tilman Apr 07 '20 at 22:30