Unable to mount external USB XFS drive
 

Hello. I'm brand new to Linux and have only used it to deal with this particular problem. I'll try to put this as clearly as possible.

I have a Buffalo LinkStation Live 500GB NAS drive (XFS) that I was running on my home network. The NAS was shared between two laptops running Windows 7 and Mac OSX.

The NAS decided to die after a power failure. The drive was actively being used by the PC when I lost power, but Buffalo's tech staff had me run a number of tests and they believe the issue is with the NAS hardware and not the drive.

So, in order to try and retreive the data, I have Ubuntu 9.10 virtualized with VMWare using Windows 7 as its host. I have a Windows share enabled so I can write to the Windows drive from within the Ubuntu virtual machine.

I pulled the NAS drive and installed into a external USB enclosure. Once connected to the laptop, I've taken control of it via Ubuntu by telling it to Connect/Disconnect from Host.

Ubuntu sees 3 new filesystems under "Places":

- 304 MB Filesystem (this one is accessible)
- 499 GB Filesystem (error)
- 501 MB Filesystem (accessible too)

For the 499 GB one, telling it to Mount the filesystem results in an "Unable to mount 499 GB Filesystem. DBus error.org.gtk.Private.RemoteVolumeMonitor.Failed: An operation is already pending". I've also seen it give a mounting error 32 (not sure what I did to produce that).

I also went into Palimpsest Disk Utility. It sees my 500 GB Hard Disk and lists it as Samsung HD501LJ, MBR Partition Table.

Under that it lists:

- 304 MB Filesystem, Linux Ext3 (version 1.0), mounted as dev/sdb1
- 510 MB Filesystem, Linux XFS, mounted as dev/sdb2
- 499 GB Extended, Contains logical partitions, /dev/sdb4 (doesn't say mounted)

Under the 499GB partition are two subpartitions:

- 140 MB Swap Space, 140 MB, /dev/sdb5 (doesn't say mounted)
- 499 GB Filesystem, Linux XFS, /dev/sdb6 (doesn't say mounted)

The last one (sdb6) has a message at the top that says "Mounting File System" with a pinwheel spinning to denote action.

I read somewhere else that the issue could be that the drive was not properly unmounted because of the power failure. Therefore it can't mount like the other partitions.

Any idea how to access this partition of the USB (former NAS) drive so I can move the data into the Windows share? Any help would be appreciated. Someway to force it to unmount itself?

$xfs_repair -n /dev/sdb6

XFS repair?
 

I installed XFS Repair but doesn't see to be doing anything at all.

$xfs_repair -n /dev/sdb6 gives me "-n command not found".
xfs_repair -n /dev/sdb6 (without the $) seems to do nothing at all. The terminal just sits there.

What is it supposed to do?

Drive busy
 

Also, I should mention that everything always tells me that the drive is busy. For example, asking Ubuntu to Safely Remove the Drive says it's busy.

"Ubuntu 9.10 virtualized" seems to be the problem. Boot from the Ubuntu CD and *don't mount the drive and run xfs_repair. I doubt if low-level apps would run correctly under a virtualized environment.

I believe this has to be a virtual machine on Windows because I need to be able to move the data from the XFS filesystem to my NTFS (Windows) filessystem.

No, you don't need a VM machine to transfer files from XFS to NT. Ubuntu will natively mount and write to NT partitions.