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I am running Ubuntu. I have taken a 250GB hard drive from my old machine, and wanted to use it as an external hard drive with my laptop. I bought a USB to SATA cable, and connected it to my laptop, but I couldn't find my hard drive mounted there.

I don't know if my hard drive is in working condition or not.

Now how do I verify if my hard drive which I took from my old machine is in working condition or not? Is there any way to see that my hard drive is detected or if there's some problem?

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  • If your unable to find it to mount it there are only two possible explanations. The cable isn't work or the device isn't working. If the device was working right before you pulled it then replace the simplest thing to replace the cable.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jan 3, 2014 at 21:11
  • Well @Ramhound the cable is working since it is been detected when I run lsusb command
    – Rajan Pathak
    Commented Jan 4, 2014 at 6:35

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Try lsusb to check if USB-SATA adapter is visible to the system, and then fdisk -l to see if HDD is available.

PS Maybe it's stupid question, but have you connected power to your disk? There are some USB-SATA adapter that do not provide power connection.

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  • I confirmed running lsusb that adapter is visible and as far as power is concerned ,usb-sata adapter have two usb connector may be one for power itself.But I am not sure .Would you like to tell how to make sure that power is there in HDD?
    – Rajan Pathak
    Commented Jan 4, 2014 at 6:38
  • It's simple - if you hear HDD spinning up when connected, then power is there :)
    – Pawel Walczak
    Commented Jan 4, 2014 at 12:38
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To see if any device is detected in a standard ubuntu type install, open a console window, type "tail -f /var/log/syslog" and plug the device in.

It should show what the kernel is seeing and doing with respect of the hardware. This works for drives, and is one way of seeing what device a disk is mapped to.

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