Ubuntu

Dear All, Hope you are doing great. I ran into a very strange issue. I have a Dell T7500 machine that runs ubuntu 12. I have 8 different drives from different manufacturers of varying sizes with data on them. These 8 drives were hooked to this Dell machine using external docking stations. Now, we brought a Startech 8-bay enclosure. When I insert all these drives into the enclosure and plug it to the Dell machine, only the drive in the first slot works. If I put drive8 from slot8 into slot1, it mounts fine. But when I put it back to slot8 and drive1 in slot1, it doesn't popup. In this way, the 7 other slot drives show up as unknown volumes in disk utility. fdisk gives input/output error. parted gives unrecognized label error. But, when I plug this enclosure to a Ubuntu machine running 12 in another office, all 8 drives fire up and they all mount absolutely beautiful. I used/formatted/partitioned all these 8 drives using Ubuntu 10 on my machine. And then the enclosure was connected after an upgrade to 12. Please share any pointers. P.S.: No formatting is supposed to be done. Because, all drives have info on them.

What type of drives? SATA or SCSI?

What type of connection to the host? Cable or USB?

Hi hicksd8,

Those are all enterprise grade SATA drives.

I am connecting them using USB 3.0 interface.

Startech recommends that I use USB3.0 rather over SATA.

Right then, if the whole shooting match connects just fine to a different host then the two things to think about are:

1. USB standards compatibility, is the failing host not fully USB 3.0 compliant, and
2. Is the failing host incapable of supplying the required level of USB power.

First thing to try is to use a powered USB hub in between host and enclosure and see if that does it.

Hello again,

The hub didn't help with the mounting.

However, when I tried the SATA cable, all 8 drives came up and some of them had a yellow warning in the disk utility page saying misaligned by 3021 bytes. Please consider repartitioning.

But the drive accessibility was slow compared to USB 3.0

Any comments?

Was it a USB 3 hub that you tried?

Yes