Cannot See Drive - Linux Mint

[tippunmon]

Installed FreeFile Sync; always been my favourite sync software using Windows but now using Linux Mint. After installation there are two of my hard drives not showing on 'browse' screen for some unknown reason, the other two show fine. This means I cannot backup my "3tb DATA" drive to my "3tb BACKUP" esata drive. The odd part of this is the esata drive shows and can be accessed but the internal sata "3tb DATA" drive does not. Neither does the 1tb internal sata hdd used for 'slave' functions and experimentation.

My goal is to be able to sync entire drive known as "3tb DATA" to the external backup drive known as "3tb BACKUP". Please note these are a pair of drives purchased at same time for purpose of efficient data backup.

Would appreciate any suggestions (please) as to what is wrong?

[bgstack15]

I have never used esata, but I will assume that drives connected in that manner will appear as regular disk drives. In GNU/Linux, you want to make sure your system sees the disk in question. In Mint, you probably see the disk mounted as "/run/user/USERID/3tb BACKUP" or similar. This is the mount point for the filesystem. To see if the disk is actually visible to the OS, check the output of

ls -al /dev/sd*


Run this command when the disk is not connected, and when it is connected. Hopefully you will see a difference, such as a /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc is added. Also, each partition is given a number, so you probably have just the one partition /dev/sdc1 or similar.
The OS needs to see this device, before you are able to mount the filesystem on one of the partitions to the user-friendly "/run/user/USERID/3tb BACKUP" location.

Ah, but at a second glance, it appears that you are asking about the main disk itself. Depending on how Linux Mint was set up, you might have multiple partitions which get mounted to various places, such as / (root directory) and /home and /var. To see the source partition and mounted directories, use command

mount


Without any flags, the mount command will show you what is mounted. Coincidentally, this can help you figure out if your /dev/sdc1 is mounted anywhere already.

The "sda, sdb, sdc..." convention used to mean "SCSI disk a, SCSI disk b," etc. In VMs you'll tend to see /dev/vda for virtual disk A, etc. Nowadays, most disks whether through USB, esata, and sata (or heaven help you, IDE) will show up as an sd* device. MMC and memory sticks like SD cards might show up differently; I forget exactly.

[tippunmon]

Many thanks for taking time and trouble to help. Take some time to digest your very comprehensive, detailed and helpful response so please be patient. Thanks again.

[tippunmon]

Once again thanks for the help. Terminal shows five drives, presumably includes the dvd writer which is attached to a sata connection. Ran the MOUNT command as you kindly suggested and got back a lot of information which is beyond my understanding. PASTE'd below in case it means anything to anyone else;

david@david-B450M-GAMING:~$ ls -al /dev/sd*
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 Mar 2 14:18 /dev/sda
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 Mar 2 14:18 /dev/sda1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 16 Mar 2 14:18 /dev/sdb
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 17 Mar 2 14:18 /dev/sdb1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 32 Mar 2 14:28 /dev/sdc
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 33 Mar 2 14:28 /dev/sdc1
david@david-B450M-GAMING:~$ mount
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=4012712k,nr_inodes=1003178,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=816592k,mode=755)
/dev/nvme0n1p1 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
tmpfs on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k)
tmpfs on /sys/fs/cgroup type tmpfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=755)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/unified type cgroup2 (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,nsdelegate)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,xattr,name=systemd)
pstore on /sys/fs/pstore type pstore (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,hugetlb)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/pids type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,pids)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,freezer)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/rdma type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,rdma)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,blkio)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/devices type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,devices)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/net_cls,net_prio type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,net_cls,net_prio)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpuset)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/memory type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,memory)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu,cpuacct type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpu,cpuacct)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,perf_event)
mqueue on /dev/mqueue type mqueue (rw,relatime)
hugetlbfs on /dev/hugepages type hugetlbfs (rw,relatime,pagesize=2M)
systemd-1 on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type autofs (rw,relatime,fd=44,pgrp=1,timeout=0,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct,pipe_ino=21232)
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw,relatime)
configfs on /sys/kernel/config type configfs (rw,relatime)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw,relatime)
/dev/sdb1 on /mnt/0de18a99-0660-4456-94f9-4e73920f1403 type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,x-gvfs-show)
tmpfs on /run/user/1000 type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=816588k,mode=700,uid=1000,gid=1000)
gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/1000/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000)
/dev/sdc1 on /media/david/3tb BACKUP type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096,uhelper=udisks2)
/dev/fuse on /run/user/1000/doc type fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000)
david@david-B450M-GAMING:~$

[tippunmon]

NOW SORTED thank you.

Must be a component in latest version causing issues. Uninstalled FreeFile Sync then installed 10.18 (two versions ago) and suddenly - it works fine!!!