NTFS Secondary Storage Drive Mounting Problem

[suhka]

Hello, and thank you in advance for reading this. I am a new Ubuntu user, and have questions regarding fixing and mounting a corrupted NTFS partition.


The situation: I have a Windows XP NTFS partition located on /dev/sda1. I had Ubuntu 7.04 before and it was mountable. Unfortunately, after I installed Ubuntu 7.10, the drive doesn't want to mount anymore.

I have tried mounting it by various methods prescribed in the forums, with no results.

This is the error message I received when I try to mount my drive:

$MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0).
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or you have hardware faults, or you have 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 you have SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first you must activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for the details.

I cannot boot into the Windows partition because it seems to be corrupted.

sudo fdisk -l shows the following:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x9dc96e9e

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        9725    78116031    7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x5247b59a

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1       19929   160079661    7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 6488 MB, 6488294400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 788 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xea58cbf6

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *           1         748     6008278+  83  Linux
/dev/sdc2             749         788      321300    5  Extended
/dev/sdc5             749         788      321268+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

What I have tried: I have tried to mount it by editing the /etc/fstab file, but that did not work. I came across ntfsfix but the following error comes up:

Mounting volume... FAILED
Attempting to correct errors...
Processing $MFT and $MFTMirr...
Reading $MFT... OK
Reading $MFTMirr... OK
Comparing $MFTMirr to $MFT... FAILED
Correcting differences in $MFTMirr record 0...OK
Correcting differences in $MFTMirr record 1...OK
Correcting differences in $MFTMirr record 2...OK
Correcting differences in $MFTMirr record 3...OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Setting required flags on partition... OK
Going to empty the journal ($LogFile)... Failed to empty $FILE_LogFile/$DATA : Input/output error
*** glibc detected *** ntfsfix: double free or corruption (fasttop): 0x08050f18 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6[0xb7e97d65]
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(cfree+0x90)[0xb7e9b800]
/usr/lib/libntfs.so.9(ntfs_attr_close+0x47)[0xb7f7bdb7]
/usr/lib/libntfs.so.9(ntfs_logfile_reset+0xce)[0xb7fa16fe]
ntfsfix[0x8049074]
ntfsfix[0x804a1e4]
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe0)[0xb7e44050]
ntfsfix[0x8048ee1]
======= Memory map: ========
08048000-0804e000 r-xp 00000000 08:21 65557 /usr/bin/ntfsfix
0804e000-0804f000 rw-p 00006000 08:21 65557 /usr/bin/ntfsfix
0804f000-08093000 rw-p 0804f000 00:00 0 [heap]
b7d00000-b7d21000 rw-p b7d00000 00:00 0
b7d21000-b7e00000 ---p b7d21000 00:00 0
b7e2d000-b7e2e000 rw-p b7e2d000 00:00 0
b7e2e000-b7f72000 r-xp 00000000 08:21 212603 /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.6.1.so
b7f72000-b7f73000 r--p 00143000 08:21 212603 /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.6.1.so
b7f73000-b7f75000 rw-p 00144000 08:21 212603 /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.6.1.so
b7f75000-b7f78000 rw-p b7f75000 00:00 0
b7f78000-b7faf000 r-xp 00000000 08:21 114558 /usr/lib/libntfs.so.9.0.0
b7faf000-b7fb0000 rw-p 00036000 08:21 114558 /usr/lib/libntfs.so.9.0.0
b7fb5000-b7fbf000 r-xp 00000000 08:21 212643 /lib/libgcc_s.so.1
b7fbf000-b7fc0000 rw-p 0000a000 08:21 212643 /lib/libgcc_s.so.1
b7fc0000-b7fc3000 rw-p b7fc0000 00:00 0
b7fc3000-b7fdd000 r-xp 00000000 08:21 212644 /lib/ld-2.6.1.so
b7fdd000-b7fdf000 rw-p 00019000 08:21 212644 /lib/ld-2.6.1.so
bfda4000-bfdba000 rw-p bfda4000 00:00 0 [stack]
ffffe000-fffff000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0 [vdso]
Aborted (core dumped)

Thank you very much.

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Execute this

sudo mkdir /media/ntfs
sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /media/ntfs 
ls /media/ntfs

Post exact output here.

[suhka]

Thank you for the very quick reply devils_casper.

brian@hello:~$ sudo mkdir /media/ntfs
brian@hello:~$ sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /media/ntfs 
$MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0).
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or you have hardware faults, or you have a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows TWICE. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If you have SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first you must activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for the details.
brian@hello:~$ ls /media/ntfs

[devils casper]

Your NTFS partition has been corrupted and you can fix it through Windows tools only. Boot up Windows OS and run chkdsk on C: Drive. In case Windows OS in not booting up, plug-in your harddisk in a machine having any Windows OS and run chkdsk.

[the dsc]

Hope no one minds if I bring this thread up for a sort of follow up.

What causes that? NTFS on usb external hdds on linux are somewhat prone to that? Or it shouldn't be expected as anymore usual than with some native fs?

[D-cat]

What causes that with any filesystem on any OS, especially when it comes to external drives, is improper unmounting or hardware failure. This can be from pulling the drive during a write, sudden poweroff (bonus if there's a surge), bad memory passing on corruption and outright crashing. In a Windows environment, you probably shouldn't rule out malware as well. I saw some indication that compression may have been used on that drive as well; that only ups the ante. Can't rule out from this that the hard drive wasn't at the end of its lifespan either. I've also seen USB controller errors cause disk corruption problems.

Assuming faulty hardware is not the issue, the best way to prevent this on removable drives is to always select "Safely Remove", exact wording varies from OS and even distros. In a text based linux, simply use umount [device] .

While common problem with NTFS can be fixed in Linux, more complicated ones are required to be fixed with a Windows utility. This has to do with the lack of open documentation on the NTFS format.