Journal timothy's Journal: Complaints! No. 4: Western Digital "My Passport" drive 2
Trying to get the data off the dying drive in my previously most-used laptop; am working mostly from my netbook in the meantime.
The Western Digital "My Passport" drive I bought yesterday at CostCo doesn't mount in Linux (Ubuntu 9.10): gParted doesn't show it, it doesn't show up on the desktop. I had assumed that I'd plug it in, immediately reformat w/ gParted to either ext3 or FAT32, and then plug it into the dying machine to slurp off the data, but no joy.
Googling finds that lots of people have had trouble w/ this line of drives under Linux (and some under OS X) as well.
A smaller complaint: this drive comes with a very small USB connector on the drive, and two cables: one of them is very short (maybe 16 inches), one of them is longer (a few feet) but the drive end is an ungainly docking station. I wish they'd have gone w/ a more conventional USB plug, so replacements would be easier to find, and I could choose a length I wanted from the always-growing stockpile of USB cables. (One day I need to count the total number of USB connector-type combinations I've got going
Guess that 2d part doesn't much matter -- I'll be returning this drive today.
It'd be interesting to know... (Score:2)
What does the kernel log show when you plug the drive in? Googling around, it seems that some people find it works OK and other people have problems.
Running dmesg before and after, then subtracting the two to get the lines that actually have to do with plugging the thing in could be useful in seeing why it won't work.
Re: (Score:1)
Returned it, or I'd tell you ;)
Replaced w/ another 500GB drive, but this one's a Seagate desktop-sized one. It has some foibles, too, but seems to basically work.
And in some sort of Murphy's law corollary, this laptop (the "dying" one) is back to working seemingly OK, now that its data's been backed up. Maybe it's like whispering "glue factory" to a recalcitrant horse ...