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Thread: Mounting USB NTFS drives

  1. #1
    Join Date
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    Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

    Mounting USB NTFS drives

    I am trying to mount an NTFS USB drive. I am able to connect a FAT32 drive to the same port, so I am sure it is not the port. I have installed ntfs-3g.

    Now when I run fdisk, I get:

    Code:
    sudo fdisk -l
    
    Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
    Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x0005519e
    
       Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
    /dev/sda1   *           1       37595   301981806   83  Linux
    /dev/sda2           37596       38913    10586835    5  Extended
    /dev/sda5           37596       38913    10586803+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
    
    Disk /dev/sdb: 300.1 GB, 300090728448 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 36483 cylinders
    Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x00000000
    
    Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table
    Next I tried mounting the drive

    Code:
    sudo mount /dev/sdb /media/external_ntfs/ -t ntfs-3g
    NTFS signature is missing.
    Failed to mount '/dev/sdb': Invalid argument
    The device '/dev/sdb' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
    Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
    partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?
    If I understood this correctly, /dev/sdb is a 'device' whereas there should be a '/dev/sdb1' which is 'partition' which can be mounted. However, I do not see any partitions under /dev/sdb1 etc under /dev.

    What am I missing here?

  2. #2
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    Re: Mounting USB NTFS drives

    You want to link/mount the partition, not the main drive.
    Try using /dev/sdb1 instead of /dev/sdb

  3. #3
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    Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish

    Re: Mounting USB NTFS drives

    Quote Originally Posted by srajama View Post
    I am trying to mount an NTFS USB drive. I am able to connect a FAT32 drive to the same port, so I am sure it is not the port. I have installed ntfs-3g.
    Automount of external ntfs drives works out of the box. You don't need to install anything.

    But here's your problem:


    Quote Originally Posted by srajama View Post
    Code:
    sudo fdisk -l
    
    <snip>
    
    
    Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table
    Unless you edit the partition table or reformat that device, you won't be able to mount anything.
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  4. #4
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    Re: Mounting USB NTFS drives

    It looks like it could be a blown hard drive. I am running testdisk on the device to see if I can recover at least some data off the drive. I'll see how this goes.

    Any suggestion on utilities other than testdisk to run on this drive?

  5. #5
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    Re: Mounting USB NTFS drives

    I tried running testdisk and both quick search and deep search are not showing me any partition data.

    At this point I am mostly interested in recovering a few folders off the drive. Is there any way I tool by which I can do something like this - "assume NTFS and read disk" ?

  6. #6
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    Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish

    Re: Mounting USB NTFS drives

    Part of testdisk is the Photorec recovery utility which can find and recover certain data files (not just photos). From the package description:

    PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover
    lost pictures from digital camera memory or even Hard Disks.
    It has been extended to search also for non audio/video headers.
    It searchs for
    * Sun/NeXT audio data (.au)
    * RIFF audio/video (.avi/.wav)
    * BMP bitmap (.bmp)
    * bzip2 compressed data (.bz2)
    * Source code written in C (.c)
    * Canon Raw picture (.crw)
    * Canon catalog (.ctg)
    * FAT subdirectory
    * Microsoft Office Document (.doc)
    * Nikon dsc (.dsc)
    * HTML page (.html)
    * JPEG picture (.jpg)
    * MOV video (.mov)
    * MP3 audio (MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1) (.mp3)
    * Moving Picture Experts Group video (.mpg)
    * Minolta Raw picture (.mrw)
    * Olympus Raw Format picture (.orf)
    * Portable Document Format (.pdf)
    * Perl script (.pl)
    * Portable Network Graphics (.png)
    * Raw Fujifilm picture (.raf)
    * Contax picture (.raw)
    * Rollei picture (.rdc)
    * Rich Text Format (.rtf)
    * Shell script (.sh)
    * Tar archive (.tar )
    * Tag Image File Format (.tiff)
    * Microsoft ASF (.wma)
    * Sigma/Foveon X3 raw picture (.x3f)
    * zip archive (.zip)
    You'll have to search the forums/google for a howto. It's a bit fiddly and it's been a long time since I used it, so I don't want to mislead you with misremembered information. It's very good, but be warned: the recovered files do not have their original names. You'll get (possibly) many thousands of files in dozens of folders all with incomprehensible filenames.
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  7. #7
    Join Date
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    Re: Mounting USB NTFS drives

    Thanks for the tip - I did not know photorec could run on a unformatted volume like this! Very cool!

    I'll know how it goes in another 4 hrs and 21 mins...

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