it just doesnt work, you double click on it and the mouse pointer spins but nothing happens, no disk activity light on the drive. it locks up windows explorer and if you let it, it can lock up the entire windows pc. But in linux its perfectly fine, read quickly and stuff, i tried reformatting in linux but it didnt change the windows issue. Yes i know it is a 12 year old drive but its storage
What's it formatted in and what drive is it? Accepted formats are: NTFS Fat32 Fat exFat Others, but they're much less common. Try formatting it in one of those.
Make sure the drive is using the NTFS file system. It's appropriate for Windows, and will work with Linux. It's probably using the ext2/3/4 file system, which won't work with Windows.
Sounds like you reformated it to ext2/3/4. In Windows, you can use Disk Management to work with disk partitions. A decent tutorial on how to use Disk Management can be found here. On Linux, there are various tools, including fdisk (fdisk tutorial) and parted (parted tutorial), to do the same task. You are going to delete any partitions on the disk that you need to be accessible on Windows, and add new NTFS partition(s) as needed. This will remove all of the data in the partitions you delete.
Before trying this, keep in mind it could either FIX the problem, not do anything, or CORRUPT the drive requiring a reformat/losing data stored on the drive. (if you don't have a partition on the drive, and can't see it in 'my computer' goto NO PARITION below) What happens when you open an administrator command prompt in Windows (to run as admin, right click on command prompt, to do this)... If the messed-up drive is d: or e: or f: or whatever, keep in mind as you'll need to know for the next step. type CHKDSK /F d: (Replace d: with whatever the drive letter is, just keep the : part of it). If you had a power failure prior to this happening, this could be part of it. I would highly doubt though that problem would persist through a reformat. NO PARTITION, or 'I have already done the above step, or cannot do it' You should also run an application that can read 'smart data', preferrably from outside of Windows, like inside of your distro of linux or it's own boot-up diagnostic environment. S.M.A.R.T. data is the drive's heart monitor, basically, and is always running on the drive, but depending on how your PC is setup it may or may not be set to receive such data (most are, but if you built it yourself, you may not have set the SMART setting on your host controller in BIOS). It's worth a shot, because if something is corrupted in the partition table (this can happen when reading (mostly writing to) drives from linux), or something is wrong with the hardware itself, this might just help, or find the culprit. Also, have you tried: replacing the data cable with a spare, or getting a different chipset/IDE or SATA driver for Windows (sata was only just coming out 12 years ago) checking your power settings that the drive isn't powering down in Windows after a few (or 20) minutes... a few oddball drives can cause problems here. Again, I'd not do any of this stuffs without first going into linux and backing up anything important. Remember, drives are getting cheaper all the time. Does sound like it's getting tired of life though, 12 years is a long time for a hard drive.
meh, I think its dead, it wont reformat, as soon as I put it in the dock and connect it the machine will slow down and not open the drive, Windows Explorer will crash and on a good day it will say that it is RAW file format, but I check in Linux and its NTFS, I will try to reformat in linux again, but hard drives are cheap, so I will probably get a replacement
