Filled external hard drive appears empty in nautilus after 12.10 reinstall

**darkod** · March 25th, 2013

In theory I agree that the ext disk wasn't encrypted itself. But if Home was encrypted and you copied files from there, are they decrypted and stored as plain files, or not? I have no idea.

Because if they are copied encrypted, you might be in big trouble. The point of ecryption is that you can hardly break it.

**Paco009** · March 25th, 2013

Just to clarify, as far as I know there should be no encryption relating to the drive in question. All the crypt/swap drives/partitions should be ones that were automatically created by Ubuntu during the install when I opted to encrypt the underlying install drive and to require a passphrase to decrypt the home folder. When the drive in question is mounted and nothing shows up on it, both of these encryption measures should be unlocked and thus irrelevant. I'm obviously at a loss too.... anything else I can try? I was planning on trying the drive on a Windows machine next just to see what happens...

**Paco009** · March 25th, 2013

My understanding was that after the home folder is decrypted all the files are accessible like normal. I've used encrypted home folders in the same way on other installations and copied files are always accessible on other drives/machines afterwards.

**Paco009** · March 27th, 2013

Tried the drive on a Windows machine today and it read everything fine, so definately not encrypted. Any ideas/suggestions as to how I can get it working on Ubuntu. The computer is a Toshiba Portege R935-P330 if that makes a difference. I would love to be able to restore my files.... help???

**oldfred** · March 27th, 2013

Did you try chkdsk.
Linux NTFS driver will not normally let you open NTFS partitions that need chkdsk, to prevent further damage. Even if Windows opens it.

**steeldriver** · March 27th, 2013

Those 'My Passport' drives are funny - unless you reformatted the bare drive at some point, they initially appear as a 'Virtual CD' and have a little Windows (or Mac, depending on the version) client that manages the hardware level encryption. I'm not sure whether that really goes away even if you opt not to password-protect the actual data (using the SmartWare software).

[FWIW I'm fighting with one at the moment that appears to have died and won't mount past the 'CD Drive (E:)' stage even in Windows]

**Paco009** · March 28th, 2013

The drive in question is literally brand new. I took it out of the box, reformatted it to FAT32 to make it compatible with a PS3 and then copied all my files over to it no problem. After the 12.10 re-install the drive spins up and opens fine, but I cannot access anything or write to the disk. It is not encrypted, it is not corrupted. Other than that I have no idea what's going on. It's definitely something bigger than a faulty drive.

**darkod** · March 28th, 2013

Can you open other usb disks or sticks in the same 12.10?

**Paco009** · March 28th, 2013

I have another Western Digital Passport formatted as NTFS which functions totally normal as well as a pair of flash drives which work fine (NTFS and ext4)

**oldfred** · March 28th, 2013

Some have reported that some of these external drives do not come partitioned. If you just format and start using it is like a super floppy drive, not a partitioned hard drive. So then most systems have issues as they expect partitioning.