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New to linux but have been researching this for a few evenings without success. I have two disks in my machine. I wiped windows and installed Ubuntu on one of the disks. I can't seem to access the other disk.

  • it doesn't show in gparted
  • it doesn't show in the ubuntu command line

I have a completely different computer running windows 11 so I plugged the drive in there and it showed up. I tried reformatting as NTFS and plugging back into Ubuntu but still nothing.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Output of lsblk:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0         7:0    0     4K  1 loop /snap/bare/5
loop1         7:1    0  55.5M  1 loop /snap/core18/2284
loop2         7:2    0 110.7M  1 loop /snap/core/12821
loop3         7:3    0  54.2M  1 loop /snap/snap-store/558
loop4         7:4    0  61.9M  1 loop /snap/core20/1361
loop5         7:5    0  61.9M  1 loop /snap/core20/1376
loop6         7:6    0  65.2M  1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1519
loop7         7:7    0 110.8M  1 loop /snap/core/12725
loop8         7:8    0  43.6M  1 loop /snap/snapd/15177
loop9         7:9    0 248.8M  1 loop /snap/gnome-3-38-2004/99
loop10        7:10   0     9M  1 loop /snap/canonical-livepatch/132
loop11        7:11   0  43.6M  1 loop /snap/snapd/14978
nvme0n1     259:0    0 232.9G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0 232.4G  0 part /

Update / solution

I have found the problem and I have to apologise but it was something I did without realising. When I wiped windows off I also removed the graphics card and stuck in a really old one. When doing so I must have plugged the SATA cable back into a different port on the motherboard. On this Gigabyte motherboard there are two SATA ports that are disabled when using an M.2 drive. I didn't know this but just found out today when troubleshooting this problem. Moved the cable to another port and now the drive shows up in Ubuntu. I'm terribly sorry for wasting anybodies time but hope posting this outcome might help others.

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  • Please update question with output of lsblk. Commented Mar 16, 2022 at 20:48
  • Done. The 250gb disk is the one with ubuntu installed, the disk im missing is a 4tb hdd. Commented Mar 16, 2022 at 20:52
  • A better command is lsblk -Sa. Commented Mar 16, 2022 at 21:24
  • I'm sorry @Bib - this command didn't return anything. Commented Mar 17, 2022 at 20:00

1 Answer 1

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Try sudo fdisk -l. It shows up mounted and unmounted devices and modify its partitions.

Also, you could play with tune2fs -l /filesystem to view superblock and its features. For getting rw permissions in your Windows partition you'll have yo get fuse installed:

sudo apt install fuse

You should list the device in /etc/fstab:

echo "/dev/sdaX    /mnt/win    ntfs    defaults,users   0   1" >> /etc/fstab

And mount it after you create a folder (chmod 777) in /mnt/NAME and mount the device following the instruction below:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdaX /mnt/NAME

If you get an error like:

The disk contains an unclean file system (0,0). Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount. Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. Please resume and Shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting.) Could not mount read-write, trying read-only.

Then you should unmount with umount /mnt/NAME, restart Windows and run as administrator powercfg.exe /h off to delete the hiberfile.sys file that impedes the mounting.

ntfs-3g provides rw permissions to Linux users at NTFS FS If you are going to use this disk for storage purposes only, I recommend you to format the disk to vFat

mount -t vfat /dev/sdaX /mnt/NAME

THE DUMP / PASS VALUES I GAVE ARE FOLLOWING MAN CRITERIA :

The fifth field, (fs_freq), is used for these filesystems by the dump(8) command to determine which filesystems need to be dumped. If the fifth field is not present, a value of zero is returned and dump will assume that the filesystem does not need to be dumped.

The sixth field, (fs_passno), is used by the fsck(8) program to determine the order in which filesystem checks are done at reboot time. The root filesystem should be specified with a fs_passno of 1, and other filesystems should have a fs_passno of 2. Filesystems within a drive will be checked sequentially, but filesystems on different drives will be checked at the same time to utilize parallelism available in the hardware. If the sixth field is not present or zero, a value of zero is returned and fsck will assume that the filesystem does not need to be checked.

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  • Thank you for the suggestion, I have tried and here are the results: fdisk -l : same results as in my post, no 4tb drive. Without know which disk it is I cannot mount it. I cannot return to windows with the disk as it has been completely formatted. Commented Mar 17, 2022 at 20:02
  • Hi Max you said in a different computer It recognised It perfectly so I'm wondering about 1) Which BIOS mode are you running in the problematic PC? 2)What do you mean with "Without know which disk is I cannot mount it" ? Commented Mar 17, 2022 at 20:31
  • Hi ser356, thank you for your questions. I've confidently ruled out the bios, here's why: This computer has two disks, 4tb and 250gb. The 250gb disk used to have windows on, I formatted it and installed linux. I've changed nothing except to wipe windows and install ubuntu and yet the 4tb drive is not deteced by ubuntu. With regards to your second question: I may have misunderstood the instructions but it seemed like I should find the drive using fdisk and then add it to fstab. However the drive doesn't show in fdisk so I'm not able to add it to fstab. Commented Mar 18, 2022 at 8:06
  • Hi again Max. I'm not english speaker so I sometimes tend to get stuck with the grammar. I read again your comment and now I get you clearly. I'll insist, in other PC, It detects the 4tb Drive as a external NTFS filesystem right? Commented Mar 18, 2022 at 21:51
  • Hi Ser, thank you very much indeed for trying to help me. Please see the original post - turns out this was an error on my part and I was using disabled SATA ports on my motherboard without realising. Thank you again for all your help. Commented Mar 20, 2022 at 19:22

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