TCL is not seeing my Western Digital 1TB usb hard drive

[gerald_clark]

I said the information was inaccurate.  I did not say you were lying or hiding anything.
Your attitude is offensive.

[tinypoodle]

You are saying you made this disk under Windows XP, there is NO WAY in windows XP to format a DISK (and not a partition) with NTFS, so you MUST HAVE A PARTITION ON IT. If you dont, you nuked it.

First you make everyone focus on what your friend calls in a different linguistic approach "nuked" - which is exactly what we all here tried to tell you since you posted your output of 'fdisk -l'.
If you printed it intentionally or involuntarily wrong does not make any difference from a technical viewpoint, we have to rely on the info provided as it is given.
The missing bit of info was (mis)leading into a totally different direction and priority.
You gave the impression that a "nuked" partition table was at the root of the matter, and not how to possibly mount an invisible partition.

I mean do you honestly think I posted over 22 posts in a 24-hour period because I'm bored and wanted to hide things from you.  Give me a break.

An attitude of such selfishness when you see people trying to help you over a thread of so far 32 posts, stressing your investment of time and energy rather than that of those who try on a voluntary base and unpaid for such to help you to the best of their ability in combination with hints of hostility and rudeness will not get you far anywhere where free tech support is provided out of a purely idealistic motivation.

Like gerald_clark said, I am also happy that you now have it working (and even more that it appears that there is nothing wrong with your disk).

Remains the partition table of your /dev/sda which in accordance to the language of your friend appears to be "semi-nuked", I have already pointed to 'testdisk' to attempt to fix that.

[docsulo]

Remains the partition table of your /dev/sda which in accordance to the language of your friend appears to be "semi-nuked", I have already pointed to 'testdisk' to attempt to fix that.

Well that makes sense.  I thought you meant to use testdisk on the removable drive.

[maro]

Hmm, rather interesting what has come out in this thread over night (at my end of the world). I can't resist to express my agreement with tinypoodle and gerald_clark: If up to three of the more experienced users in this forum are offering their time in provinding help they need all the details. If we would have known (a) about the existence of the '/dev/sdb1' file system, and (b) that it is of type NTFS this whole thread would have been over by reply #3.

I fail to see how anyone of the "helpers" (or the wider Linux community represented through their many forums) can be seen as "responsible" for this particular unfortunate sequence of responses. I might not go as far as some of the suggestions made here, but in the absense of correct and complete information we'll always end up with "garbage in, garbage out". Enough said ....

So in summary (and as a mental note to myself): always ask the user for both fdisk -lu /dev/[hs]d* and blkid /dev/[hs]d* This should increase the chances to validate the information (a bit like a "belts and braces" approach) and minimise the "noise" level.

And finally, the '/dev/loop*' entries reported by 'fdisk -l' are the consequence of loop-mounted extensions.

[docsulo]

Thanks Maro.  The loop thing had me baffled.

As to holding anyone responsible for my errors - I certainly don't and I apologized for not saying it was NTFS from the beginning.  That would have helped a lot.

I also appreciate the help - a lot.