I'm trying to mount my new Western Digital Elements 2tb hard drive, but every time I try to plug it into the computer I get this error message:

I've tried using ntsfix and it seems like it worked:
But when I tried opening the hard drive from nautilus I still got the same error message as above (no other volumes was connected at the time).

I've also tried opening and watching it in GParted, and I can see it there as a volume that's not allocated. When I tried to allocate the hard it I got the message that it had no partition table. And that I cold make one. I tried and Ubuntu suggested to make a MS-DOS partition table for it. But there I got a little scared as I've not done this before.

So should I make a MS-DOS partition table, or are there other ways to fix it?

The external hard drive is brand new and was brought today. And I don't have the possibility to test it with Windows or Mac as I'm using Linux only on my machines.

Hope someone's able to help :)

Then you probably have no data on the drive and no use for the NTFS partition that it came with. Create one linux partition taking the entire drive with gparted and format the drive with the linux filesystem of your choice; ext3 or ext4 would be fine. See if you can get the drive to work in linux that way.

The above assumes that you don't need to ever share data on the drive with windows machines. The 2TB size is right at the size limit for standard mbr type partitions. I suspect that your hard drive may have been partitioned with GTP instead of MBR which doesn't have that 2TB limit. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

for more info on GPT partitioning. Since WinXP generally doesn't support and won't recognize GPT partitions, WD may have otherwise hacked a standard MBR in some non-standard way making it unrecognizable in linux or they may have used some widows partitioning tool that creates partitions differently enough when pushed to the maximum size limit that they are not properly picked up in linux. The "Failed to read last sector" error points to this type of problem. At any rate, a repartitioning and reformatting will most likely fix the problem. If you need to share data with windows machines, gparted can create NTFS partitions so just create a windows NTFS partition and reformat. Make sure you use an MBR as opposed to GPT partition if you need to data share with windows; gparted can create either type.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks ^^
I gave it the MS-DOS partition table and formatted it to NTFS and now it works like a charm :)

But will formatting it to ext3 or ext4 make it work better with my system? Is there a big difference between using NTFS and ext3/ext4 on external hard drives connected to Linux systems? I'm going to use this hard drive as additional space for my main computer.

Sharing big files with Windows and OSX users is what I have USB-keys for, so I don't need this hard drive to play well with either Windows or OSX machines ;)

.

For some things, there's a big difference. If you wanted to backup using rsync, for example, the difference in unix style file permissions and dates vs ntfs style could definitely trip you up. If you're not using it for Windows, then don't use ntfs, would be my advice.

Thanks!
I will reformat it into ext3 then ^^

Or is ext4 considered stable for home computers now? Does it still have the issue with potential data loss?

Ext4 vs ext3 is probably not something I want to wade into. I use ext3, works great and if, if, you did want to read it on a Windows machine, you can do it with ext2fs (a free third party Windows driver)

Thanks for you answer ^^

Just remembered that I've used ext4 for my home folder for about a year now as I'm using Ubuntu on my main computer with Ubuntu (and they started to use ext4 in 9.10 if I remember right). Only problem I've had is that I have lost the file permissions to open documents I've worked with if I lost the electricity (empty battery for example).

So I think I will go for ext4 as this hard drive is going to be connected to my main computer for most of time.

Hi mostlyharmless,
I'vd just bought my second "Elements" hdd and will use to backup my linux (linuxmint-18.3 and linuxmint-19) pc. Of course, do use ext4 it does not cause any problems and just works! I've just formatted the whole disk to ext4. No risk - everything is a risk, actually. I should know, I am 93 years young!
Good luck with the "Elements" disk!
OldAl.

Please do not resurrect necro threads. This thread is 8 years old. Sure ext4 works fine today but at the time of the OP there were some issues with the new filesystem for some users.

Perhaps you could suggest to jeremy that he re-think his aversion to locking "dead" threads. Then these situation could be avoided altogether.

Mere user exhortations seem to be unheeded.

1 members found this post helpful.

I believe in jeremy's point for not locking threads. He wishes the members to have restraint to understand that some member within a necro thread may not even be active at this time. Sometimes older threads do have value but may not need updated to current functionality.

Each poster to a necro thread should also weigh the value of information at the time of the OP posting and that members post may not be relevant to the thread by changes in time for operations that were not true at OP time.