I bought an HP Simplesave 1tb external drive from a friend, plugged into my XP and was shown the typical new hardware found/drivers installed, successful, etc. but nothing in My Computer.
I checked the device manager and it was listed, but then went to disk management which had no new disks shown.
So I plugged into my Vista laptop, doesn’t show in my comp, but does in device manager and disk management, as seen in this image:
http://i42.tinypic.com/pps0z.jpg
When I right click on the unallocated to format it says I must initialize, but right clicking to the left of that and clicking initialize tells me the disk is write protected. This drive has no external switches, only usb and power port. And I am unable to get inside to the actual drive as the case seems to be impossible to open/has no screws. So other than it not even showing up in XP, my problem in vista seems to say that the disk is write protected. Does this mean that maybe the drive was stolen? Is there some precaution they take that idk about these days?
So after googling every error and trying everything I moved on to run ubuntu live cd and try on there. And still had a problem, this is my terminal input and output:
root@ubuntu:~# mkdir /mnt
mkdir: cannot create directory `/mnt’: File exists
root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/sdb
mount: can’t find /dev/sdb in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab
root@ubuntu:~# sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x37e1b1f3
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13073 105008841 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 13074 14593 12209400 7 HPFS/NTFS
root@ubuntu:~# lsusb
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 03f0:4607 Hewlett-Packard
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
root@ubuntu:~# dmesg | tail
[ 804.092940] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
[ 804.092949] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : Data Protect [current]
[ 804.092958] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: Logical unit access not authorized
[ 804.092972] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 8
[ 804.092978] Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 1
[ 804.092986] Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 2
[ 804.094064] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
[ 804.094075] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : Data Protect [current]
[ 804.094084] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: Logical unit access not authorized
[ 804.094098] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 0
root@ubuntu:~#
One other thing, on ubuntu, one thing does pop up in the drive area and it shows as a cd rom drive? But unable to access it. So not sure about that.
As much as I’d like to just return it to a store, there’s no receipt, I may be able to try Staples as they seem to carry it and they sometimes allow no receipt exchanges. But I would hate for this to be stolen and then get in trouble for it.
I’ve posted this because I’ve looked everywhere else and while everyone was able to resolve their similar problem, I have not been able to. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
