I can't recognize an HDD formatted on VFAT

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I want use an HDD disk formatted on VFAT, and both Fedora 40 and Windos 10 don’t recognize when I plugin It in an USB port (is external disk). It dont recoznize the Unit, I check with Gparted and File Administrator and its impossible recognize it. ¿Any suggest please? Thanks in advance. Pedro

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If there is a problem with the device, there should be a message indicating what the problem is at the end of the output from the dmesg command. Try running sudo dmesg --follow in a terminal window, then plug your USB drive in and watch for any error messages to be added to the dmesg log.

Edit: If everything is OK (color-coded green) and there are no error messages along the lines of “medium error” or anything like that, then take note of what name was assigned to the device (e.g. something like sdz, but the last letter can change each time you reconnect the device). There will be a corresponding file with that name under /dev (e.g. /dev/sdz). You can pass that device name to tools like smartctl or fsck to further test the functionality of your device or the state of your filesystem. If you’ve partitioned your device (likely), then you will need to append the partition number that contains the filesystem you want to check when using fsck (e.g. sudo fsck /dev/sdz1). You can use something like lsblk /dev/sdz to list the partitions on your device (or just check the contents of the /dev directory with the normal ls command).

If there is nothing wrong with the device or the filesystem, then you should be able to mount the filesystem somewhere with a command like sudo mount /dev/sdz1 /mnt.

1 Like
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Hi, I execute sudo dmesg –follow without connect the external disk. The errors on the ouptut where

0.201976] x86/cpu: SGX disabled by BIOS.

Then I ran the command mesg –follow a second time, with the external HDD connected, and the new errors were these:

6.994139] Bluetooth: hci0: Malformed MSFT vendor event: 0x02
0.911864] integrity: Problem loading X.509 certificate -65
Thanks for your efforts.

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I should clarify – dmesg logs messages from all the system’s devices, not just the USB ports. Not every message in the dmesg log will be relevant to your problem. If there are no error messages starting with usb ... or sd ... (after the timestamp), then there is probably nothing wrong with your device. Does lsblk list your device? Is it partitioned? Does fsck report any errors if you provide it the path to your VFAT filesystem?