I'm still confused.
Please help me understand, I posted a related matter in another post even, but in my mind, it all makes no sense.
I use an hdmi/usb kvm switch, with my old win7 computer on my left, and my win11/Deb13 (mate) to my right, setup as dual boot w/separate drives.
I have 3 sets each of 2 identical pairs of drives in main/backup use (6 drives), Seagate and WD.
It started out Deb not being able to even see/mount a drive, then got worse. My next solution was to reformat all the drives with exFat.
A few I formatted in win7, a few with Deb. Then Deb doesn't see my drives. If I plug them back in the win machine, mostly win wants to repair them, and sees them fine. Randomly they mount in Deb. Then after a week messing around with this, I started a live CD and the drives weren't recognized either. Then I plugged my 32G thumb drive into Deb, and it won't work either. I reboot the Deb machine and my 32G usb mounts fine.
Questions:
Why does Deb not recognize my drives? Why should it matter which machine last used the exFat drives? Should it matter that some were formatted on each machine? Why does it seem like neither OS likes their drive to be read by any other system? Why would my Deb machine read the drives after a reboot?
I hope I'm capable of understanding any response.
Thanks again.
Statistics: Posted by bassman — 2026-01-21 06:47