LinuxQuestions.org - [SOLVED] External Hard Disk Drive, Possible Corrupted Partition?

Hello All,

I have a question about an external 2.5" Western Digital Scorpio Black (320 GB) SATA HDD.

First just want to point out that this is just your normal 2.5" HDD that you would normally buy as a replacement HDD for a laptop, or to place in a separate USB enclosure, etc...
Originally when I setup this HDD I had basically 2 partitions on it. The 1st partition is a 40 GB HPFS/NTFS/exFAT and the 2nd partition was an ext3 Partition for my Linux machine with the remainder of the HDD space, around about 280 GB.

I hadn't used this Drive in a while and recently plugged it in the other day and was NOT able to mount either partition to my Linux machine, OpenSuSE 11.4 (Linux localhost 2.6.37.6-0.11-default #1 SMP 2011-12-19 23:39:38 +0100 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux).

If I run "fdisk -l" I can see:

Code:

Disk /dev/sdc: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors

Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disk identifier: 0xdc341073



  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System

/dev/sdc1  *          63  102398309    51199123+  7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sdc2      102400000  625141759  261370880  83  Linux

And then trying to mount both partitions I get the following:

Code:

mmartin:/mnt # mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/WD320Linux

mount: you must specify the filesystem type



mmartin:/mnt # mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc2 /mnt/WD320Linux

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc2,

      missing codepage or helper program, or other error

      In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try

      dmesg | tail  or so



mmartin:/mnt # mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/WD320NTFS

ntfs_mst_post_read_fixup: magic: 0x00180900  size: 1024  usa_ofs: 0  usa_count: 8: Invalid argument

Record 6 has no FILE magic (0x180900)

Failed to open inode FILE_Bitmap: Input/output error

Failed to mount '/dev/sdc1': Input/output error

NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a

SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows

then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very

important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate

it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.

/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation

for more details.

For the mounting of the NTFS Volume I get the same error when using mount and ntfs-3g commands.

The WEIRD part is, if I power up my OpenSuSE 11.2 Virtual Machine (using VMPlayer on my OpenSuSE 11.4 machine, which I was using for testing stuff a while back) I can successfully mount the NTFS partition, but that is the only partition that shows up in fdisk.

These commands were run from the Virtual Machine:

Code:

localhost:/ # fdisk -l

......

..... left out internal HDD stuff .....

......



Disk /dev/sdb: 42.9 GB, 42949672960 bytes

255 heads, 56 sectors/track, 5874 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 14280 * 512 = 7311360 bytes

Disk identifier: 0xaa10aa10



  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System

/dev/sdb1  *          1        5873    41933192    7  HPFS/NTFS



localhost:/mnt # mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/WD320

localhost:/mnt # echo $?

0

As you can see I can mount the NTFS partition without any problems at all, and I'm able to browse the files without any problems what so ever. I guess I'm just at a loss why it only shows one partition in the VM and that I'm able to mount it..? Also, in the VM if I go to "Partitioner" in YaST, it only shows the HDD having one partition with only 9 MB of Unpartitioned Space?

Could anyone suggest what I might do about this. Whether I should just backup what files are left and just wipe the drive clean and start over fresh or what not...?

Any suggestions would be great!

Thanks in Advance,
Matt