light slowly flashing on external hard drive

linuxman

Member
A new WD Elements portable hard drive has been plugged into a USB 3 port on a Linux desktop.

The hard drive does not appear on an fdisk -l
listing. The small light on the drive is slowly flashing.

What is happening ? Why doesn't the drive appear in the fdisk listing ?

Is the system trying to automatically mount the hard drive ?

Is the USB port underpowered ?

I hesitate to unplug the hard drive while the light is flashing in case this corrupts the filesystem
on the hard drive.
 
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