Can't mount external drives

[claydoh]

I can't say, but over the years I have had multiple concurrent hardware failures the appeared while upgrading or installing a new OS. Usually it involved the cd burner at the very least, but it has at least once involved that, an HDD, and the motherboard (burst capacitor) at the same time. Or at least he symptoms of these going south manifested themselves during an OS install or upgrade.

This is how I learned to love the fiasco that was the KDE 4.0 release, during the development cycle of Kubuntu 8.10. I had zero choice, no $$ and a lone Alpha disk of 8.10 as the only one that would boot on my PC with its hastily downgraded mobo/cpu.

I do wish I had actual answers, as opposed to anecdotes.

[DoYouKubuntu]

No worries, @claydoh. If you do think of something, let me know.

My problem now is that I don't want to risk mucking up the other external drive, i.e., by plugging it in to the new laptop and ending up with it fried like the other one. I don't have another computer with new enough USB ports to try it/them in, so I'm kind of stuck. To be clear: I have full access to all my files right now--they're on the old laptop--with my phone, new laptop, and other computers. So the backup disks are not hugely important. But since I bought such a small drive for my new laptop [500GB vs 1TB in the old one], I intended to use the external drives for storing most of my images, videos, and such.

The external drives are just a few months old. It would be shocking [to me] if that one really has failed. I mean, the ones they replaced were six years old and working perfectly. That's why I retired them--I figured I should replace them while they were still known to be working, rather than waiting for them to fail! I replaced them with identical Transcend drives.

[DoYouKubuntu]

As I continue plodding through K's endless options (which I love--don't get me wrong!), I came across something just now that I THOUGHT would solve the problem! In System Settings, under Hardware | Removable Storage, I chose Removable Devices--and saw that nothing was checked! So I checked "Enable automatic mounting of removable media," "Automatically mount removable media when attached," etc. I happily hit 'apply' and went to get the Transcend drive. I plugged it in, its light flashed, 'device notifier' popped up, now with three entries [since I've installed digiKam], and chose "open with file manager" just like before...

...and just like before, it said "could not mount this device." Same for 'Download photos with Gwenview' and 'Download photos with digiKam.'

In Dolphin, I navigated to /media/<myname> and refreshed. Nothing. But Transcend was listed in the left pane, so I clicked on it...

...and got this: "An error occurred while accessing 'Transcend', the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting /dev/sda1 at /media/<myname>/Transcend: Unknow [sic] error when mounting /dev/sda1"

Now, what's interesting is that, since then, the drive's light has been flashing occasionally as I do other things. And now, when I click any of device notifier's three options, the light flashes but I do NOT get the "could not mount this device" message.

I'm thoroughly confused. Any ideas?

[I'm going to reboot. Just for the hell of it. Let's see...]

ETA: Yeah...no. Restarting didn't help. Oh the drive's light flashed as the laptop was booting up, and Dolphin sees it, but that's that. So I'm back where I started.