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so I bought a compact hard disk but find that its a flash drive (lsusb shows it as Integrated Technology Express Chipsbank CBM2199 Flash Drive).

Using the Disks application shows it but doesn't know about the partitioning and contents are unknown. Strangely it shows two partitions, one is unknown and 17MB and the other is 8.4TB

fdisk -l shows /dev/sda as Disk model: SSD and has /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 correctly with sectors

I've formatted it exFAT which I thought should be usable, but it seems not

I read this thread: 22.04 does not include exfat-utils

and apt-list shows that exfat-fuse/jammy and exfatprogs/jammy are present

So, why isn't this working?

pellicle
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    Maybe this link can help you solve the problem. If you have not removed or lost the tools for exfat, it should work for you unless there is something wrong with the file system. And there can be problems, if Windows has managed the drive before you connect it to a computer running Ubuntu. It is possible that the drive is 'dirty', that a write operation was not finished correctly because data in a RAM buffer was not saved to the memory cells. – sudodus Nov 09 '23 at 22:36
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    It's a problem from the Windows side. The Windows "Fast Boot" setting leaves the disk partition in an undocumented, proprietary state that Linux isn't permitted to recognize. Boot back into Windows and disable "Fast Boot". Be prepared to have to re-disable "Fast Boot" - Windows updates have been known to turn it back on. – waltinator Nov 09 '23 at 23:19
  • @sudodus its a basically clean installation of Ubuntu ... and the disk is new – pellicle Nov 10 '23 at 01:47
  • @waltinator

    Boot back into Windows and disable "Fast Boot".

    firstly the computer is not dual boot and its a relatively fresh installation (Thinkpad) of 22.04 secondly I can't find anything that mentions Fast Boot which is not about Android...

     – pellicle Nov 10 '23 at 01:50
  • also, why is this marked down to -1 already when I can't find a similar question that has been correctly answered? – pellicle Nov 10 '23 at 01:52
  • I have not downvoted your question, and I don't know why and by whom it is downvoted. I think you should focus on the helpers (not the downvoters). Has your external drive been in [another] computer running Windows? If that is the case the problem might be what we (the helpers) suspect. Otherwise it is another problem. Please plug in the drive and [in a terminal window] run the command line lsblk -e7 -o model,name,size,fstype,label,mountpoints. Edit the original question (copy-paste and indent each line 4 spaces to render it as code) to show the command and its output. – sudodus Nov 10 '23 at 10:39
  • Depending on the output of that command line, we will ask further questions in order to identify your problem and suggest how to solve it. – sudodus Nov 10 '23 at 10:41
  • thanks @sudodus for your time, I actually didn't anticipate the votedown was from anyone who posted an answer to the question, but IMO the quality of AskUbuntu has changed since going under Stack Exchange and this sort of "reddit-alike" behaviour is regrettable. – pellicle Nov 12 '23 at 03:38

2 Answers2

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Based on my other readings outside of here I believe the drive does not work with Linux and so I've solved the problem by returning

My thanks to the people who took time to answer the question, but ultimately there was no time cost effective solution

Thanks

pellicle
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Likely, the drive is fake. I recently received a similarly fake drive from a seller on AliExpress that claimed to be 2TiB with USB3.1, but was in reality only 64GiB with USB2.0. You can analyse the drive with f3probe https://www.linuxbabe.com/command-line/f3-usb-capacity-fake-usb-test-linux

$ sudo f3probe --destructive --time-ops /dev/sda
F3 probe 8.0
Copyright (C) 2010 Digirati Internet LTDA.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.

WARNING: Probing normally takes from a few seconds to 15 minutes, but
         it can take longer. Please be patient.


Bad news: The device `/dev/sda' is a counterfeit of type limbo


You can "fix" this device using the following command:
f3fix --last-sec=125435903 /dev/sda


Device geometry:
                 Usable size: 59.81 GB (125435904 blocks)
                Announced size: 1.90 TB (4075520000 blocks)
                        Module: 2.00 TB (2^41 Bytes)
        Approximate cache size: 511.00 MB (1046528 blocks), need-reset=no
           Physical block size: 512.00 Byte (2^9 Bytes)


Probe time: 38'46"
 Operation: total time / count = avg time
      Read: 34.12s / 2097721 = 16us
     Write: 38'10" / 7327949 = 312us
     Reset: 0us / 2 = 0us

and checking the bcdDevice number in dmesg or lsusb.

Brett Ryland
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