Mounting External USB Hard Drive (NTFS)

[bryanlee1981]

I have a 250g Western Digital hard drive.

 

When i plug in the hd it auto mounts as usual and then i get the following error:

 

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,

missing codepage or other error

In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try

dmesg | tail or so

 

I have searched quite a few posts and none of the suggestions i found seemed to work for me. I am sure it is something simple, but it is beyond me. I know that NTFS support is still sketchy, but i should be able to at least read my hard drive...right?

 

The last thing i tried was:

mount -t ntfs -o ro,umask=022,users /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usbdrive

 

The output was this:

mount: mount point /mnt/usbdrive does not exist

 

Thanks in advance for any info

 

/bryan

[ianw1974]

That meants that the directory usbdrive doesn't exist in /mnt, therefore:

 

mkdir /mnt/usbdrive

 

and then try your mount command again. Normally:

 

mount -t ntfs -o umask=0 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usbdrive

 

should be fine.

[bryanlee1981]

Thanks for the reply.

 

I had previously created a directory called "external" and attempted to mount the hard drive using "mount -t ntfs -o umask=0 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/external", but i was unable to access the hard drive.

 

If i go into the /mnt folder i can see the /mnt/usbdrive folder is there, but i am unable to access it. The folder icon itself is a folder with a lock on it. I thought i might be able to change the permissions for the folder, but even after i did that i still could not access it. When i try to open it i get "Unable to enter file:///mnt/usbdrive. You do not have access rights to this location."

 

When i initially plug in the hard drive i get the same error as before:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,

missing codepage or other error

In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try

dmesg | tail or so

[viking777]

You are probably going to have to attach it to a windows machine, error check it then try again. I have had this problem with my external drive as well in the past and that was the only way to solve it. It is a shame that 'dosfsck' doesn't support ntfs then you wouldn't have to go to windows.

[ianw1974]

Are you trying to mount the drive as a regular user, or did you type "su" first to get root privileges. Normally, you'd have to mount it as root, but based on the umask being set would let either only root or all users access the mounted ntfs partition.

 

Did you check /var/log/syslog or dmesg for errors? From console, you can just type dmesg after mounting the drive with the first set of errors and see what dmesg lists - maybe something useful will be there.