USB to SATA cable adapter not recognizing hard drive

Question

I have a hard drive with Linux Mint installed that I recently rescued from a dying computer and have been using a USB to SATA adapter that comes with an external power adapter to try to get some data off that hard drive onto my netbook which uses Ubuntu 12.04.

Unfortunately the hard drive won't mount, and I can't figure out how to access the data in it.

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the hard drive itself. I actually tried installing it on a third computer (without the SATA/USB adapter - just connected the sata cables to it) and it boots up and runs fine. I checked for signs of disk errors and ran a few diagnostic tests and there are no problems there.

Any ideas?

Here is the output from dmesg:

[ 1701.424112] usb 1-5: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci_hcd
[ 1701.563450] scsi5 : usb-storage 1-5:1.0
[ 1702.561062] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     TOSHIBA  DT01ABA200            PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
[ 1702.564938] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[ 1702.568257] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 488378646 4096-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB)
[ 1702.569178] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 1702.569200] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 28 00 00 00
[ 1702.570031] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[ 1702.570046] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1702.574062] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 488378646 4096-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB)
[ 1702.575893] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[ 1702.575907] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1702.614761]  sdb: sdb1 sdb2 < >
[ 1702.614770] sdb: partition table partially beyond EOD, enabling native capacity
[ 1702.615652] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 488378646 4096-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB)
[ 1702.617907] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[ 1702.617921] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1702.618734]  sdb: sdb1 sdb2 < >
[ 1702.618742] sdb: partition table partially beyond EOD, truncated
[ 1702.618756] sdb: p1 size 31190188032 extends beyond EOD, truncated
[ 1702.618935] sdb: p2 start 31190220784 is beyond EOD, truncated
[ 1702.620570] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 488378646 4096-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB)
[ 1702.622106] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[ 1702.622116] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1702.622124] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

and fdisk -l

fdisk: unable to seek on /dev/sdb: Invalid argument

in gparted, the /dev/sdb entry shows up as "unallocated".

for lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 152d:2338 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. JM20337 Hi-Speed USB to SATA & PATA Combo Bridge
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 04f2:b1d6 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd

Edit add: Here is the product I am using: http://mail.ultraproducts.com/product_details.php?cPath=104&pPath=669&productID=669

Second edit: Tried sudo gdisk -l /dev/sdb here is what I get:

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.1
Unable to seek to 3898777598! Aborting!
EBR signature for logical partition invalid; read 0x82A2, but should be 0xAA55
Error reading logical partitions! List may be truncated!
Partition table scan:
  MBR: MBR only
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: not present
***************************************************************
Found invalid GPT and valid MBR; converting MBR to GPT format.
***************************************************************
Warning! Secondary partition table overlaps the last partition by
3410396911 blocks!
You will need to delete this partition or resize it in another utility.
Disk /dev/sdb: 488378646 sectors, 1.8 TiB
Logical sector size: 4096 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 331DA6D5-3101-4526-BDE6-FF79F449FDE7
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 6, last usable sector is 488378640
Partitions will be aligned on 256-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2042 sectors (8.0 MiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048      3898775551   14.5 TiB    8300  Linux filesystem

Answer 1

I'm an Arch Linux user and I had the same problem.

The solution was install ntfs-3g and reboot my laptop

extra/ntfs-3g 2017.3.23-1 [installed]
    NTFS filesystem driver and utilities

I can see my device now:

lsusb && sudo fdisk -l && lsblk && dmesg | tail -n 20

udevadm monitor

Answer 2

It might be using GPT rather than MBR. You can mount it with..

You can try gdisk instead

sudo apt-get install gdisk
sudo gdisk -l /dev/sdb
sudo mount /dev/sdbX /mnt    #Where X is the partition you want to mount.