External USB WD Elements HDD Unmountable, Error

[Tiko]

Hi all,

I'm using a 1 TB external HDD from Western Digital, Element series. Formatted as NTFS.

I was able to mount the drive and use it as normal in Karmic.

However, while creating folders within the drive recently, the drive unmounted itself silently. So after waiting for 2 mins, I unplugged the USB and replug it.
I have a VBOX windows XP running in background, not sure if the virtualized windows did anything to it...

And I got this error message and some instructions for windows system:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: $MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0).
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.

I can't even mount to check it.

Any one knows any software approach to handle this situation?

I really hope it's not a hardware fault, or I'll have to open up the casing, and prepare for the worst...

Edit:

Ok the HDD works fine with a Windows OS machine.
I'm just guessing a work around: Does anyone knows a way to reset the $MFT or MFTMirr records please?

Edit2:
Ok solved it using ntfsprogs package

Get package

sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

fix it

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdb1

Should fix immediately without reboot.
Replace the device path with your own error report's device path.

Reference:
http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8627316
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/inde...t-1333205.html

Edit3:

Certain files that were being moved around before the silent unmounting event, now cannot be moved or deleted, but they can be copied and accessed.

Unable to trash file: Input/output error
Error removing file: No such file or directory

Probably need a system restart...

Edit4: There's still some inconsistency errors. My findings are the same with coffeecat: you need to plug it into the windows operating system to run checks for a proper fix. There are also some data corruption, though the exact number of files affected is unknown. Woe be me for NTFS...

[viniciuscarvalho]

Thought I lost everything... 1.2 TB of data, restored thanks to your post. ntfsfix did the trick. Thanks

[ozPATT]

saved me hours as well! Great post.

[jaqian]

after running sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdb1

I get this error...

Refusing to operate on read-write mounted device /dev/sdb1

any suggestion on how to fix this?

[coffeecat]

any suggestion on how to fix this?

The ntfsfix manual (man ntfsfix) has this to say:

ntfsfix is a utility that fixes some common NTFS problems. ntfsfix is NOT a Linux version of chkdsk. It only repairs some fundamental NTFS inconsistencies, resets the NTFS journal file and schedules an NTFS consistency check for the first boot into Windows. You may run ntfsfix on an NTFS volume if you think it was damaged by Windows or some other way and it cannot be mounted.

So you probably need to repair that filesystem with chkdsk from Windows. I'm surprised an earlier poster managed to fix the problem with ntfsfix alone.

One other thing to say: if what some posters in other threads are saying is correct, there are some WD Elements drives shipping with some oddity with the formatting which is causing problems. This can be solved by using Gparted to create a new partition table and then a new partition. This, of course, will lose you any data on the drive. Having said that I've used two Elements external drives formatted NTFS without problems, so I guess the issues in this thread are down to filesystem corruption caused by unclean unmounts. In which case, chksdk in Windows is your only definitive option.

[jaqian]

Thanks coffeecat, I have it fixed now. Very strange I kept repairing it with chkdsk /f in winXP but kept failing in Mint9. I eventually formatted it as ext3 then went into windows and reformatted as ntfs took literally hours but is working fine now.

I think the problem may lie with gParted formatting as ntfs as once I got windows to do it, it seems ok.

Thanks