external hdd mount problem

daveoily · 05-24-2011, 07:06 PM

My external hdd stopped mounting, the resulting error is this...

Code:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 12: Failed to read last sector (3907027119): Invalid argument
HINTS: Either the volume is a RAID/LDM but it wasn't setup yet,
   or it was not setup correctly (e.g. by not using mdadm --build ...),
   or a wrong device is tried to be mounted,
   or the partition table is corrupt (partition is smaller than NTFS),
   or the NTFS boot sector is corrupt (NTFS size is not valid).
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

I think I may have done something nasty to the partition table, and may need a bit of hand holding while I sort it out (while installing Ubuntu.

I couldn't swear it was shut down correctly, but I'm usually pretty good with that sort of thing.

Now I get the message above when I try and plug it in (if I leave it in on re-boot, the whole boot process stops!

It's a 2TB Elements WD external drive, it's very new, and I don't think it's broken.

It just mounted fine on and old xp system (and quite definitely unmounted properly), and still get the above error on Ubuntu, perhaps Ubuntu is being a bit fussy?

Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

SalmonEater · 05-24-2011, 07:32 PM

Take it back, get the money, and buy something like the below:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817159119

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148599 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822152236

frankbell · 05-24-2011, 07:42 PM

Do you have ntfsprogs installed (I think it comes with Ubuntu, but I'm not sure--that's the ntfs package; I know it doesn't come with Debian)?

You could try taking a look at it with gparted:

sudo gparted /dev/sd[whatever]

You could also take a look at it with fdisk:

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sd[whatever]

daveoily · 05-25-2011, 07:26 AM

@SalmonEater, they look nice, where were you when I was shopping? Anyway, I've got it now and I'm sticking with it...

@Frankbell, Ubuntu has a prog called "Disk Utility" where I found my devices address thingy, output of sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb1 is

Code:

Disk /dev/sdb1: 2000.4 GB, 2000395698176 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243200 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x69205244

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

     Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1p1   ?       13578      119522   850995205   72  Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb1p2   ?       45382       79243   271987362   74  Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb1p3   ?       10499       10499           0   65  Novell Netware 386
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb1p4          167628      167631       25817+   0  Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order

and this is what I get when I just fdisk sdb

Code:

Disk /dev/sdb: 2000.4 GB, 2000396746752 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0002de0f

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1      243202  1953513560    7  HPFS/NTFS

So, it looks like there's 4 partitions, which is odd, I've not messed about with partitioning on it at all. If this is going to get messy, I think I should perhaps backup, but then again, I don't think there's anything on there that's totally vital. Let's see what more suggestions come my way, hopefully it'll be a doddle to fix.

I had to install gparted, seems it's not standard on Ubuntu, and after pressing various buttons on it, I backed away, it will it seems, happily create a new partition table for me, but at the expense of wiping the data, I'm not ready to lose that yet, there are surely other tricks to try.

ntfsprogs is on there, although it's all command line stuff isn't it, not just type in ntfsprogs and go to a gui... if it's useful, and it does look it, I'd like to know what to use from it

mkfs.ntfs, mkntfs, mount.ntfs-fuse, ntfscat, ntfsclone, ntfscluster, ntfscmp, ntfscp, ntfsfix, ntfsinfo, ntfslabel, ntfsls, ntfsmount, ntfsresize, ntfsundelete

are the possibilities. I get a bit nervy when thinking about even starting one of them in case it just does bad stuff merely because I started it.

frankbell · 05-25-2011, 07:17 PM

There's some good news. Linux can still see the partition.

Try running fsck on it. I'm not an expert of fsck; luckily, I've only suffered one HDD failure, and when it failed it failed for good. But here's a good page on it, with examples.