'Unable to mount' external hard drive

[Beachcomber]

Can anyone tell me what's wrong here? I can't get my external hard drive to work. I last used it a couple of days ago and it was fine, and I haven't done any updates or anything since then. I hope it's not broken - everything's on there! Thanks for any help!

Edit to add, I use Mint, and am not very tech savvy!

 

[CaffeineAddict]

Try again reproducing this dialog and then immediately run:

sudo dmesg | grep error

Also post output of:

cat /etc/fstab
sudo blkid
lsblk

 

[Niall13]

I had the same issue and tried again on a windows 10 and it worked. The format was NTFS and the Grub on my Mint did not see it. I later fixed the problem and set all my external to FAT as a precaution. The NTFS story is fixed with some sudo apt commands.

 

[Beachcomber]

Try again reproducing this dialog and then immediately run:

sudo dmesg | grep error

Also post output of:

cat /etc/fstab
sudo blkid
lsblk

Thanks for the replies. I'll just reiterate, I am a complete Luddite and I've barely touched the command line since I started using Linux 9 months ago (because everything's worked fine). So if I have to ask for clarity please be patient!

So, if I've followed you right, I connected the hard drive again and got the same error message. Then I've put your first code into the command line, and got:

Then tried your second command, and got:

Is that what you meant? I have not got a scoobie what any of that means, or what to do next!

 

[Beachcomber]

I had the same issue and tried again on a windows 10 and it worked. The format was NTFS and the Grub on my Mint did not see it. I later fixed the problem and set all my external to FAT as a precaution. The NTFS story is fixed with some sudo apt commands.

I don't suppose you have instructions for how to fix the NTFS problem? I'll try it on my old Windows 10 laptop to check if it works on there, but I really need to be able to use it with this laptop.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

Here is what I'd do with this problem (run commands 1 by 1, not all at once):

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ntfs-3g

First run id -u and id -g and make sure output of both equals to 1000, if it doesn't let me know what number is printed before continuing.

id -u
id -g

If it is 1000 then open etc/fstab with:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Copy the following and append to the file (do not delete other entries):

UUID=4E1AEA7B1AEA6007 /media/carrie/Elements ntfs-3g defaults,nls=utf8,dmask=027,fmask=137,uid=1000,gid=1000,windows_names,nofail 0 0

Save with CTRL+O and then close with CTRL+X

Run commands:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo mount -a

Is there any error with the last command sudo mount -a?
If not then the drive is mounted, check it, otherwise post output of the command.

 

[Niall13]

I'm sorted and all external drives are working on Mint.

 

[theLegionWithin]

Can anyone tell me what's wrong here? I can't get my external hard drive to work. I last used it a couple of days ago and it was fine, and I haven't done any updates or anything since then. I hope it's not broken - everything's on there! Thanks for any help!

not sure it's exactly relevant but this --> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/484081/wrong-fs-type-bad-option-bad-superblock-on-dev-sdx seems to indicate that the error will result if the partition "/dev/sdb1" is NTFS and is damaged, if "/dev/sdb1" is using a non-native filesystem, or if there's no filesystem at all.

this is from someone who had the same error and there's quite a bit of discussion about it - https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=416830

 

[Beachcomber]

Thanks for the replies, and sorry for the radio silence from me. I was knackered at the end of the week and decided to leave it till the weekend. I'll go through your replies properly and see how I get on.

 

[bob466]

It is possible the Drive has failed.

 

[Beachcomber]

I really couldn't get my head around this! I tried it in my old HP laptop on Windows 10 and it worked fine, so I was able to get the files off the drive and onto another one. The new one works as it should on the Linux laptop, so I'm back up and running.

I may be back soon to pester you all about trying to get a new outlook mail address to work on Thunderbird , but that's another issue!