Can't find portable hard drive anymore

[larry412]

My system will no longer recognize my portable hard drive. I do not know why this happened but I think the drive was unmounted improperly while I was at work. I have been checking forums for answers and nothing works. I have had this problem for about two weeks. I cannot find the drive in my system anywhere. Any ideas would be appreciated.

[taurus]

Plug it in. Then, open a terminal and post the outputs of these commands.

Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal

sudo fdisk -l
df -h

[larry412]

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x6ba5261e

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 9542 76646083+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 9543 9726 1477980 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 9543 9726 1477948+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
cats@freekbox:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 73G 8.5G 61G 13% /
varrun 1.5G 212K 1.5G 1% /var/run
varlock 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /var/lock
udev 1.5G 48K 1.5G 1% /dev
devshm 1.5G 12K 1.5G 1% /dev/shm
lrm 1.5G 39M 1.5G 3% /lib/modules/2.6.24-23-generic/volatile
gvfs-fuse-daemon 73G 8.5G 61G 13% /home/cats/.gvfs

This is my internal hard drive. I have a Seagate Free Agent 500 gig external hard drive that worked without any problem until a couple of weeks ago. I came home from work and the computer was off but the hard drive was not. Now it is on from the time I boot my computer until I unplug the portable hd.

[LowSky]

connect it to a MS Windows machine, let it load up then disconnect it correctly. then try it on the Linux machine.

NTFS formatted drives can sometimes be a pain in the rear end.

[larry412]

I don't have a windows machine and the only access to one is at work and I don't think they would approve of that.