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I wanted to backup some files on my external hard disk and just barely managed to do so, because it randomly unmounted and mounted again. My first thought was that the hard disk's life is about to end. But then I also inserted my usb stick, which is brand new, and the same thing happened. Does anyone have any idea what to do to fix this? Sorry if this has already been asked, but I really searched a lot to no avail, before posting here.

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  • I had similar prob too. It's the hdd faulty due to formating by windows. You need to run chdsk in windows and repair the Hdd. then you need to reformatted it to fat32. mounted back to Ubuntu and formatted back to desire file system of Ubuntu. hope it will solved yours too. May 12, 2013 at 8:51
  • If possible, I don't want to format my drives, especially the external hard disk which is for backup and has millions of useful files.
    – Aris
    May 14, 2013 at 2:13

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It actually sounds more like an issue with your computer's hardware than an Ubuntu specific issue. Do you have issues with all USB devices, or is it just disk drives?

You could plug something in and use lsusb to check if the device is actually there and unmounted or if it's physically becoming disconnected due to some fault with the USB ports.

You could also try it in a different USB port. Sorry if this sounds obvious, but sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

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  • I never had this problem on windows, so I think it's not a hardware problem. And I have a USB mouse, camera and speakers on, that have no problem, so it might only be hard disk drives. As for the 'lsusb' method, the thing is the drives remount immediately after unmounting, so it's like they stop working for a brief moment and then they work again. This happens quite randomly. It can happen while I'm transferring files, or even while doing nothing.
    – Aris
    May 12, 2013 at 8:27

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