Once you’ve done the above, delete everything above this line.
Steps to reproduce
Downloaded Linux Obsidian-1.8.1.0.applmage
Extracted to external USB hard drive
External drive then became unrecognized and after swapping USB ports, attempting to manually mount the drive , rebooting, ect… it remains unrecognized.
Did you follow the troubleshooting guide? [Y/N]
Expected result
Actual result
Hard Drive will still not mount…
Environment
System Details Report
Report details
- Date generated: 2025-07-10 13:51:06
Hardware Information:
- Hardware Model: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. VivoBook_ASUSLaptop X512DA_F512DA
- Memory: 12.0 GiB
- Processor: AMD Ryzen™ 3 3200U with Radeon™ Vega Mobile Gfx × 4
- Graphics: AMD Radeon™ Vega 3 Graphics
- Disk Capacity: 128.0 GB
Software Information:
- Firmware Version: X512DA.317
- OS Name: Fedora Linux 42 (Workstation Edition)
- OS Build: (null)
- OS Type: 64-bit
- GNOME Version: 48
- Windowing System: Wayland
- Kernel Version: Linux 6.15.4-200.fc42.x86_64
Additional information
The chances that Obsidian caused this are zero.
Unfortunately, it looks like you hard drive happened to fail while you where running Obsidian from it.
It took me a while to calm down enough to properly respond to this answer. As a Avionics Product Support Team lead for a major weapon system, i know that while possible… coincidences are rare… but accepting them is easy. I will attempt to determine the failure mode myself.
So thanks for the lackluster “easy button” response and please know I will not use your product ever again, and I will likely inform others to not use it either.
It’s very hard for software to cause hardware damage. This is most likely an hardware failure.
If, and it’s a big If, this is an software-caused hardware failure, you most likely need to report this problem to the Linux kernel developers.
Obsidian is a very high level software: we use electron, which uses node.js, which uses some c libraries, which call some OS-functions, which in turn use some kernel drivers to write to disk.
The hardware sanity checks should be implemented between the kernel drivers and the firmware of the harddrive.