and Windows + some hdd do me.
I was experiencing this problem of accessing a hard drive (ssd or hdd makes no difference here), via an usb-sata cable in Windows 10. Mine is a really old sata 2.5'' notebook disk, manufactured in 2006, 100GB. Works "out of the box" in gah-noo linux.
The Internets told me I have to format it to NTFS. Um, well—in order to be able to format it as NTFS, this was precisely what I was going to do. But then the "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers" site hosting that forum asked me to answer a few questions—a user research is what they call it. My answers were somewhere between 2 and 4 where they asked how I'm coping with computer problems as a user. Am I able to fix this or that myself or do I consult the Net. Not a single mention about Windows—just as if it was the only OS out there. Funny, I was answering for myself as a *nix noob. If I were to answer similar questions on Windows, the "grades" would be lower. Windows is just incompatible and designed for whom it was designed for... Although they did mention their OS in the last question—"Would you recommend a Windows PC to ..."—to which I said "0", no, why would I recommend Windows to anyone? But I really like Visual Studio, which does seem like getting locked or addicted. I hope I can escape before finding out that I can't learn and/or code without it. And I have to say, Microsoft's online C# documentation is great.
I did format that disk (thank you, other Internets! You do it by pressing Win-x and clicking Disks Management; then it becomes more or less obvious), but I decided not to assign any "drive letter" to it—guessing that the OS will do that every time I plug the disk in. Afterall, there is no such problem with SD cards (also: disguised as an usb-stick), up to some complaints about errors and how about some scanning by Defender... Nope. It's still seen by "Disk management", but not in the gui file manager, nor in the command line. I went back and set the new partition to "active". No, still not there yet. My last try was to assign the letter "D", and—halleluyah—I can exchange data between two Win machines and make backup copies. Although I make backup copies on *nix partitions too, here and there (see ** below). I wonder what happens if I plug the SD card first and the letter "D:\" is reserved—will this render the usb-sata thing (temporarily) unusable or not detected? Let ust seeth, as Noah put it***. No, "I'm all right", the SD card now shows up as "E:\". And we don't ask questions about two disk drives formatted as "D:\", plugged into usb ports of one Windows machine. Perhaps one of those would become overridden by its OS.
Question for "Developers x 4"—why not make the formatting option pop up for the user when they insert a medium lacking a filesystem or—this is my case, ext4 if I remember correctly—something that Windows doesn't recognize? (Which I think is a great feature, this lack of recognition, for obvious reasons.) Because users would click "format" too quickly and lose their data? Well, we all make mistakes. I do, at least.
** My biggest one, regarding hardware, happened in the early 2000s. I was trying to make my AT-tower box a bit more quiet and decided to add a front fan to it. 12V was the fan's working voltage, but I decided it's still too loud and decided to switch to 5V. And the fan's plug was the same as the power plugs on old IDE/ATA disks - shaped into a hexagon with two right angles, made from white plastic. And instead of re-wiring the part between the fan's plug and the fan itself (cut yellow and red cables, swap them, solder together, isolate), I just filed the other plug so that it became symmetric—the right angles of the hexagon were gone. Gone-gone-gone, gone shootin'. The extra fan worked just ok and really quiet, the cpu temperature dropped down a bit. But at some point I had to connect some other drive to my computer, so I unplugged the fan and plugged the filed plug to the disk. The wrong way. And the disk got busted just the moment I switched the machine on. I lost almost everything - no backup copies made whatsoever. I still remember the parameters: hdd 6GB, 64MB of ram, a dvd-r up to 16x (?), 3.5'' fdd, some slowish Celeron at 433MHz. And the first versions of Xwindow I saw back then (as early as Mandrake 7.0) didn't come with font antialiasing. And man, all did "run" so fast. Isn't it time to start some rumor about "empty loop conspiracy"?...
*** "2 stupid dogs", ep. Noah's Ark
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