Problem with connecting portable hard drive

[LT.Was]

Hello all!

My portable hard drive stopped working on my XP system, but it has alot of files still on it. A colleague of mine recommended I use Ubuntu to try to "fish" the files out of the drive. When I started Ubuntu, it recognized my portable hard drive but when I tried to access it further, I received an error saying Unable to Mount. I have heard that you are able to "force mount" a drive through Linux. I'm still relatively new to Ubuntu so I was wondering if anyone could help me with this.

[taurus]

What's the output of this command from a terminal?

Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal

sudo fdisk -l

[LT.Was]

As I am on a separate computer using this forum, I'll just type what it says for my portable hard drive.

Disk /dev/sdc: 320.0 GB, 220072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units= cylinders of 16065 * 512 - 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe22bcc8a
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 38913 312568641 7 HPFS/NTFS

[taurus]

What happens when you try to mount it from a terminal with


sudo mkdir /media/sdc1
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1
df -h
If you need to force mount it, you could run


sudo mkdir /media/sdc1
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 -o force
df -h

[LT.Was]

does the "df -h" go directly after "force" in the second command?