DSL - Mounting External NTFS

I recently ran the liveCD version of Damn Small Linux and it worked perfectly. I was able to mount my external HDD fine. I didn't end up transferring anything to/from it though, as I just moved files between the two internal HDDs I had on the computer. When finished, I unmounted all the HDDs and exited. The problem is now that the HDD seems to be screwed up. When I plug it into my mac, it says that the HDD is not readable by this computer. When I plug it into my XP machine, it does nothing. But when I put it back into DSL, I am able to read it fine.

What has DSL done to my HDD to make it unusable by my other OSs and how can I fix this. This HDD is my backup HDD too, so it would be very nice to get this working on my mac/XP. Thanks in advance to any ideas.

-jake

Hi and Welcome !

We have to check partition structure and filesystem of External Disk first.
Execute fdisk -l command in Terminal of DSL and post output here.

Code:

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su -
/sbin/fdisk -l

---

* Its small L in fdisk -l.

when I type that in, i get "su: invlaid option -- l" maybe I am doing something wrong?

figured it out.

these are the results I got.

"Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 60801 488384001 12 Compaq diagnostic
/dev/sdb2 * 1 1 0 0 Empty
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary."

the rest is my internal HDD stuff I believe. So what can you make of this?

According to output of fdisk -l, Hard disk has 2 partitions only. First is a 500GB Compaq Diagnostic partition and other is around 80MB or less, an empty partition.

Is that a complete output? Does Compaq diagnostic partition has your data?

That is correct. Well, as far as I knew there wa only one partition, the 500GB one. I'm not sure about the other 80MB one...but yes, this is the correct external HDD. Does this info say anything about why it would only be working on DSL and not on any other OS?

One other thing to note is that this is a Seagate external hard drive, so I'm not sure wheee the compaq diagnostic is coming from...maybe this is also part of the issue?

Does DLS list data of External disk correctly? Do you have write access in External disk?

Diagnostic Partitions used FAT32 or FAT16 filesystem and this filesystem is well supported by all Linux distributions including DSL.
I don't know why FileSystem has been changed. I would suggest you to back up data as earliest as possible.

Yes, the data is listed correctly. The file system is NTFS, so, I'm assuming that the disk thinks that it is fat32 now? Is there a way to change the system type? This is a fairly large hard drive to try to back up all of it, and my main concern is that this is going to screw up another one of my HDDs. Is this an issue? Or can you think of a way to set it back to NTFS? Thanks for all your help.

You can try Testdisk. It restores partition table correctly and works very well. Testdisk is available in PartedMagic LiveCD.