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I have a 1 TB external USB hard drive from which I deleted the original NTFS partition and created an ext4 partition through gparted.

I then started copying a 500 GB file onto the new partition, but the copy process stuck at 8.9 GB.

After un-plugging and re-plugging the USB hard drive the file system cannot be mounted anymore sometimes. The LED just flashes in a high frequency. The device is listed unter /dev/sdb but the partition /dev/sdb1 is missing. I guess the ext4 filesystem got somehow corrupted.

Sometimes the partition is mounted but I cannot read or write any of the few files I previously copied there.

When I tried to launch gparted again, it just shows "scanning all devices". Also fdisk -l just lists the partitions of my internal drive and then hangs.

So I cannot format the drive and I cannot access the partition either, what should I do to be able to use the storage again?

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  • This sounds suspiciously like a hardware failure of the drive or electronics.
    – fencepost
    Commented Apr 4, 2015 at 21:21
  • Sure, this is possible. But it just occured when I reformatted the drive and changed the partitions, before that I could read and write wihout any problems. Is there anything I could do to check for hardware defects?
    – m.s.
    Commented Apr 4, 2015 at 21:23
  • Yep.. drive itself is broke. Check dmesg or /var/log/syslog for more detailed error messages.
    – psusi
    Commented Apr 5, 2015 at 0:53
  • You might also get information from TestDisk (cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) but this doesn't sound like something you have important data on. Seeing /dev/sdb without /dev/sdb1 indicates no partition table, seeing it inconsistently indicates severe problems.
    – fencepost
    Commented Apr 5, 2015 at 1:50

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A few suggestions.

  • Did you run fdisk? Try fdisk /dev/sdb, and do the command 'p' to print the info.

  • Normally, the operating system, and if you're NOT root, will reserve part of the disk space. I believe it's in the order of 7-8% of the disk. Could that be the case?

  • Only partitioning should not change any data (only the partition table at the start of the disk). So, if you remember the partitioning parameters, you can repartition it, and should then be able to run ext2fs on the disk to check/correct). Don't format!

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