Light slowly flashing on external hard drive

[wireman]

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.

 

[beers]

What do you have under lsblk? You should at least see it in dmesg as a device or in parted

 

[wireman]

This problem has now been extended with further details in thread 'problem with USB 3 port' in
motherboards forum.