I recently bought an external hard drive by maxone to use with a Mac that I have. The instructions that I got with it was to connect it to a Windows PC and format it before I can use it with a Mac, but since I only have a Linux machine available I was hoping to be able to format it from Linux.
I have encountered similar problems some years ago but ended up finding a Windows PC to solve it. I was surprised to not find forum posts that helped me resolve it but I searched and the few things that were similar that I found were not solved, others had minor differences than my case, maybe I just didn't understand some of them properly.
My System
Linux Mint 20.04
Toshiba Satelite laptop with the hard drive connected to the USB 3.0 connection.
uname -a results:
Linux 5.4.0-77-generic #86-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jun 17 02:35:03 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
The Problem + What I tried
When I connect the hard drive I can see it turns on and feel it spinning.
In the Linux Mint settings under "Disks" I can see a new hard drive pop up as "Maxone USB 3.0". The "Volume" section says "No Media" and appears as /dev/sdc. The the gears button has everything greyed out (including the formatting option" except for "Edit mount options" which use defaults.
I can see in the terminal that /dev/sdc exists. It does not appear under in /proc/partitions though.
fdisk -l does not recognize the disk at all.
I tried using Gparted but it did not recognize the hard drive either.
lsusb did find:
Bus 004 Device 005: ID 152d:0583 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. Maxone
sudo lshw -c disk finds:
*-disk
description: SCSI Disk
product: USB 3.0
vendor: Maxone
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@7:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sdc
version: 0209
serial: DD564198838A2
configuration: ansiversion=6 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512
When I connect the hard drive I see in dmesg the following:
[205381.443074] usb 4-1: new SuperSpeed Gen 1 USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd
[205381.464174] usb 4-1: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=0583, bcdDevice= 2.09
[205381.464179] usb 4-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[205381.464183] usb 4-1: Product: Maxone
[205381.464186] usb 4-1: Manufacturer: Maxone
[205381.464188] usb 4-1: SerialNumber: 000020200909
[205381.470699] scsi host7: uas
[205381.472216] scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access Maxone USB 3.0 0209 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[205381.473026] sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
Given all of this I could not figure out a way to format the hard drive, as I do not have a partition to format or a way to initialize the drive (that I can tell at least).
Edit
As per the comments I ran some more commands that unfortunately did not work and here are the results:
sudo mkfs -t fat /dev/sdc:
mkfs.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24)
attribute "partition" not found
mkfs.fat: unable to discover size of /dev/sdc
sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdc:
mke2fs 1.45.5 (07-Jan-2020)
mkfs.ext4: Device size reported to be zero. Invalid partition specified, or
partition table wasn't reread after running fdisk, due to a modified partition being busy and in use. You may need to reboot to
re-read your partition table.
sudo echo , | sudo sfdisk /dev/sdc:
sfdisk: cannot open /dev/sdc: No such file or directory
(this is despite /dev/sdc existing (I can see it using ls)
Final Questions
Is the only way to initialize and format a newly bought external hard drive that was intended for Windows in Windows itself? Is there no way to do this on Linux?
What causes the drive to be recognized as /dev/sdc but at the same time not be registered by fdisk? Is this because of the filesystem type on it? Shouldn't fdisk be able to nuke and re-initialize a hard drive no matter what?
Thank you for your time and any help you may be able to provide.
