File system error (?)

[heretical_1]

Not sure if this is a file system error, or something else. Began having issues that were eventually traced back to (a) intermittent power cutoff and (b) failing internal hard drive (although I do not understand why an internal drive is even necessary when an external drive is plugged into the usb port). Ok, so now I have removed the failed internal hard drive and replaced it with another, and added some more batteries to the battery bank. One of my external hard drives had begun having file system errors due to the power being suddenly cut off or due to the issues with the failing internal hard drive, and now...well, the screen shot shows what I am getting. Nothing I have tried has worked, but I admit to being less than a novice here. The external hard drive is 4 tb, and I believe, but am not sure, that it is ntfs. Am using antiX on a usb stick.
The external drive was being used as a backup, so if necessary I can (with proper directions) reformat it and then put the original info back on from the original source, but it sure would be easier if I could just fix it and then still have that info already on it.
Before offering advice, you may need to know some things. I am offgrid, with absolutely no means of connecting to the internet other than my phone, and no neighbors for miles. The computer does not have wifi or bluetooth capability at all, so anything that would need to be downloaded would need to be downloaded to the phone and then cabled to the computer...zero reception inside the house or within 20 feet of it.
With that in mind, please let me know if there are things I can try that might help. Thanks!

 

[heretical_1]

Not sure if this is a file system error, or something else. Began having issues that were eventually traced back to (a) intermittent power cutoff and (b) failing internal hard drive (although I do not understand why an internal drive is even necessary when an external drive is plugged into the usb port). Ok, so now I have removed the failed internal hard drive and replaced it with another, and added some more batteries to the battery bank. One of my external hard drives had begun having file system errors due to the power being suddenly cut off or due to the issues with the failing internal hard drive, and now...well, the screen shot shows what I am getting. Nothing I have tried has worked, but I admit to being less than a novice here. The external hard drive is 4 tb, and I believe, but am not sure, that it is ntfs. Am using antiX on a usb stick.
The external drive was being used as a backup, so if necessary I can (with proper directions) reformat it and then put the original info back on from the original source, but it sure would be easier if I could just fix it and then still have that info already on it.
Before offering advice, you may need to know some things. I am offgrid, with absolutely no means of connecting to the internet other than my phone, and no neighbors for miles. The computer does not have wifi or bluetooth capability at all, so anything that would need to be downloaded would need to be downloaded to the phone and then cabled to the computer...zero reception inside the house or within 20 feet of it.
With that in mind, please let me know if there are things I can try that might help. Thanks!

 

[APTI]

(although I do not understand why an internal drive is even necessary when an external drive is plugged into the usb port).

because this is where your operating system is being stored, unless you did something very unusual.

Ok, so now I have removed the failed internal hard drive and replaced it with another, and added some more batteries to the battery bank. One of my external hard drives had begun having file system errors due to the power being suddenly cut off or due to the issues with the failing internal hard drive, and now...well, the screen shot shows what I am getting. Nothing I have tried has worked, but I admit to being less than a novice here. The external hard drive is 4 tb, and I believe, but am not sure, that it is ntfs. Am using antiX on a usb stick.
The external drive was being used as a backup, so if necessary I can (with proper directions) reformat it and then put the original info back on from the original source, but it sure would be easier if I could just fix it and then still have that info already on it.
Before offering advice, you may need to know some things. I am offgrid, with absolutely no means of connecting to the internet other than my phone, and no neighbors for miles. The computer does not have wifi or bluetooth capability at all, so anything that would need to be downloaded would need to be downloaded to the phone and then cabled to the computer...zero reception inside the house or within 20 feet of it.
With that in mind, please let me know if there are things I can try that might help. Thanks!

Before you go trying to solve computer problems you need to fix the source which you have already figured out is your power source. If your power source cuts out during any disk operation or before cache is flushed, you WILL have issues including complete loss. So solve your power issues first before you consider anything on the computer.

You will need to run ntfsfix on your ntfs drive to try to fix errors. Also run the appropriate fix on internal and all other drives depending on how you formatted them. In the future I would not use ntfs unless you are sharing with windows. otherwise btrfs or ext4 should be your choices. And when sharing something with windows users such as on a usb chip think about using fat32 unless you have files over 4GB.

To help more it would be useful to know what linux you are using, what the filesystems are and what your boot drive is. The novice tends to make alot of mistakes that complicates your life and computer, so this kind of information plus specs on the computer will help us to help you.

 

[Smilax]

I do not understand why an internal drive is even necessary when an external drive is plugged into the usb port

Is that external USB drive the one you're booting and running Linux from?

 

[heretical_1]

No. I am using antiX on a usb stick to boot up the system and for copying files from one external hard drive to another.

 

[heretical_1]

because this is where your operating system is being stored, unless you did something very unusual.

Before you go trying to solve computer problems you need to fix the source which you have already figured out is your power source. If your power source cuts out during any disk operation or before cache is flushed, you WILL have issues including complete loss. So solve your power issues first before you consider anything on the computer.

You will need to run ntfsfix on your ntfs drive to try to fix errors. Also run the appropriate fix on internal and all other drives depending on how you formatted them. In the future I would not use ntfs unless you are sharing with windows. otherwise btrfs or ext4 should be your choices. And when sharing something with windows users such as on a usb chip think about using fat32 unless you have files over 4GB.

To help more it would be useful to know what linux you are using, what the filesystems are and what your boot drive is. The novice tends to make alot of mistakes that complicates your life and computer, so this kind of information plus specs on the computer will help us to help you.

I am using antiX on a usb stick to boot up and run the system. The external hard drives are used for storing and transferring data, but not really for actually using them...I tend to transfer files to my phone to use for reading pdf's or watching videos. I did try using " df -h" to see if I could determine anything about the random internal hard drive that i replaced the dying one with, but it seems to only show details about the thumbdrive containing the antiX.

 

[Smilax]

 

[Smilax]

View attachment 32773

I am using antiX on a usb stick to boot up and run the system. The external hard drives are used for storing and transferring data, but not really for actually using them...I tend to transfer files to my phone to use for reading pdf's or watching videos. I did try using " df -h" to see if I could determine anything about the random internal hard drive that i replaced the dying one with, but it seems to only show details about the thumbdrive contaibing the antiX.

I like to play with spinning hard discs for nostalgia reasons, I inherit used hard drives often, and use GSmartControl to view SMART information on the drives before any serious use. Do you do this or something similar?

edit: Sounds like an interesting use case honestly. While I am totally unfamiliar with antiX (had to look it up) it seems the appropriate OS for what you're trying to do.

 

[heretical_1]

I like to play with spinning hard discs for nostalgia reasons, I inherit used hard drives often, and use GSmartControl to view SMART information on the drives before any serious use. Do you do this or something similar?

No idea what you are talking about, although I do have a stack of maybe 50 or more old hard drive discs that I removed when I was doing a lot of scrapping and disassembling of computers. The intent is to use them as reflective surfaces to make parabolic dishes.

 

[APTI]

No idea what you are talking about, although I do have a stack of maybe 50 or more old hard drive discs that I removed when I was doing a lot of scrapping and disassembling of computers. The intent is to use them as reflective surfaces to make parabolic dishes.

what he is talking about is a sound and good strategy. It means don't just use a drive because it seems to hold data. You use the S.M.A.R.T. on the drive to see if there are errors, such as read or seek errors that show the drive motor may become unstable and cause slow downs on data retrieval or corrupt files. And to see any other problems that are happening. You can use a graphical interface such as "disks" or just smartctl to see what you have going on. Bottom line there is if you see any errors at all on the drive you should consider retiring it because your data is at risk on it.
Now it looks like if df -h is not showing you the drives they are probably not mounted. Or may have issues that smartctl can detect. It can't fix the errors but it will tell you about low level mechanical issues and problems that are not found in normal disk scan.

 

[heretical_1]

what he is talking about is a sound and good strategy. It means don't just use a drive because it seems to hold data. You use the S.M.A.R.T. on the drive to see if there are errors, such as read or seek errors that show the drive motor may become unstable and cause slow downs on data retrieval or corrupt files. And to see any other problems that are happening. You can use a graphical interface such as "disks" or just smartctl to see what you have going on. Bottom line there is if you see any errors at all on the drive you should consider retiring it because your data is at risk on it.
Now it looks like if df -h is not showing you the drives they are probably not mounted. Or may have issues that smartctl can detect. It can't fix the errors but it will tell you about low level mechanical issues and problems that are not found in normal disk scan.

definitely sounds complicated! I did run "lsblk -f", and verified that the drive is ntfs, the did the "ntfsfix" thing. The results are shown in this screenshot.

 

[APTI]

definitely sounds complicated! I did run "lsblk -f", and verified that the drive is ntfs, the did the "ntfsfix" thing. The results are shown in this screenshot.

yep, it is saying to use windows and chkdsk because of the corruption. That corruption can be from the power issues which needs to be the first thing you fix. And S.M.A.R.T. is not complicated. it just shows you what the electronics on the drive have found and run into. It is not a fix it utility it is a look at this utility. For what you are doing I strongly recommend it because if it shows errors on drives you need to replace them. If you do not, you will spend countless hours running down errors and problems that will just turn out to be physical drive issues. It is a huge huge time saver. Drive problems that can be detected can show as anything from slow computer to services and programs failing to run. Things that you will spend many wasted hours trying to unsuccessfully fix. Things that could have been solved simply by replacing a dying drive.

smartctl part of smarttools.... install it if you do not already have it. Learn it, love it, live it.

 

[heretical_1]

yep, it is saying to use windows and chkdsk because of the corruption. That corruption can be from the power issues which needs to be the first thing you fix. And S.M.A.R.T. is not complicated. it just shows you what the electronics on the drive have found and run into. It is not a fix it utility it is a look at this utility. For what you are doing I strongly recommend it because if it shows errors on drives you need to replace them. If you do not, you will spend countless hours running down errors and problems that will just turn out to be physical drive issues. It is a huge huge time saver. Drive problems that can be detected can show as anything from slow computer to services and programs failing to run. Things that you will spend many wasted hours trying to unsuccessfully fix. Things that could have been solved simply by replacing a dying drive.

smartctl part of smarttools.... install it if you do not already have it. Learn it, love it, live it.

well, darn. The windows 7 that I have on one of my computers doesn't have chkdsk...I think that came out in windows 10. And that computer is a real power hog, which is one of the reasons that my power kept cutting out, even after adding some additional batteries to the bank. Is there any way to just go for broke and reformat the external drive using the linux system?

 

[APTI]

well, darn. The windows 7 that I have on one of my computers doesn't have chkdsk...I think that came out in windows 10. And that computer is a real power hog, which is one of the reasons that my power kept cutting out, even after adding some additional batteries to the bank. Is there any way to just go for broke and reformat the external drive using the linux system?

nope. chkdsk has been part of windows since by windows 95. if you do not have it then something is wrong with your windows installation. I would not keep the drive in ntfs if all you use it for is linux. ntfs has lots of overhead to operate and ext4 or btrfs or even fat32 would be better.
If you are not worried about data on the drive then yeah go ahead and reformat it and don't worry. But use smartctl first and make sure the drive has no errors on it. If you see any, they are not correctable, no errors found by SMART are correctable. If you see ANY errors over zero, ditch the drive. Get what you need off it if anything and turn the drive into an art project.