External Hard drive - read only
Hello, looks like my external drive's file system (NTFS) is corrupted as whenever I'm connecting it, it just loads as read-only. I feel the problem has been caused 'cos the USB cable seems to be cutting out power to it at times when I accidentally touch the cable. Most of the times I even get a kernel panic when I "safely remove the drive", but:
-how can I confirm that it's the file system having got corrupt and not something else? -Is my data at risk? -Since this is my data backup drive, gparted says I have about 130GB free - can I partition this so I have the 130GB as another filesystem and continue with backing up to the new partition? -Is a damaged filesystem repairable without data corruption? -(appologies if I sound crazy here, but no harm asking) Is it possible to change the filesystem of the corrupted drive/partition? |
fdisk operates on a drive without mounting it.
The 'read only' could be a kernel thing. Have you CONFIG_NTFS_RW=y? The kernel .config is often in /boot Use mount -t ntfs-3g -o rw /dev/sd?? /somewhere |
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I didn't find any kernel .config file in /boot but I did manage to find a .config file in /usr/src/linux-headers-3.0.0-12-generic in which there is reference to CONFIG_NTFS_RW Here's what the file reads Code:
CONFIG_NTFS_FS=m Quote:
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The option rw means to mount the filesystem read-write. :) |
The config should be in the same place as the kernel as config-<kernel-version>
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The kernel's built in NTFS driver has only limited support for writes. The comment for the CONFIG_NTFS_RW option states:
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I did try booting up my PC with an Ubuntu LiveCD and sure enough the external USB drive works perfectly with read/write. |
I would go by djnichols comments as he seems to have done more with this than I have recently.
That said, ignore the kernel stuff, and use ntfs-3g, making sure that ntfs-3g is installed. the site is http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-advanced/ It's been so long I was mixing the older ntfs driver which never got writes sorted, and ntfs-3g which did. So if you mount ntfs - it's the old (read only) driver For read/write - use ntfs-3g |
Thanks so much everyone for your help.
I installed 'ntfs-3g' and as soon as I connected my external drive, I could read/write the drive contents. Thanks once again. |
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