External hard drive does not mount properly????

[pedro_miguel]

Hi there guys;

I need help with something, i've moved to Ubuntu last Friday (thats why this stupid question) and deleted windows for good(i was tired of it) but i have this wd external hard drive with 500gbytes that refuses to mount : ) i know that there are loads of tutorials on how to do it but i just dont want to loose everything i have inside the hard disk the error i get is the following:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 12: Failed to read last sector (976771119): Invalid argument
HINTS: Either the volume is a RAID/LDM but it wasn't setup yet,
   or it was not setup correctly (e.g. by not using mdadm --build ...),
   or a wrong device is tried to be mounted,
   or the partition table is corrupt (partition is smaller than NTFS),
   or the NTFS boot sector is corrupt (NTFS size is not valid).
Failed to mount '/dev/sdc1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdc1' 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?

Thanks a lot in advance guys and sorry about the questions i just moved to Ubuntu.

[yancek]

The output you posted shows you have multiple drives. What else (operating systems) do you have on the machine besides Ubuntu and which version of Ubuntu do you have?

Did the installation succeed and have you been able to boot into Ubuntu and use it since you installed it on Friday? If so, have you made any changes in the interim?

Boot your Ubuntu CD, on the Desktop click the Applications tab and look for terminal, click it to open and type:

sudo fdisk -l

That's a lower case Letter L in the command and it is your partition information to post here for help.

[pedro_miguel]

Well thats the problem yancek i only have Ubuntu installed i've deleted windows and installed Ubuntu on friday without any problems and i've been using it since then with no problems except this one!! and the Ubuntu version is the latest 11.04... If i made changes in the interim??? well i would like to help you in there but i only started Ubuntu on friday i have no idea whats interim sorry mate...ok i did what you said and this was what i got back:

 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        9470    76062720   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            9470        9730     2085889    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            9470        9730     2085888   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500105740288 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00029d3c

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       60802   488385560    7  HPFS/NTFS
pedro@pedro-HP-Pavilion-dv1000-EF025EA-AB9:~$ ^C
pedro@pedro-HP-Pavilion-dv1000-EF025EA-AB9:~$

[nightoil]

I've had issues in the past with wd external drives. I tend to steer clear of them now. But that doesn't solve your problem

from:
community.wdc.com/t5/My-Passport-for-PC/Running-My-Passport-Essential-on-Linux-Ubuntu/td-p/52770

try in a terminal

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/ -o force

if it works your drive should be mounted under /mnt

If that's ok we can move on to what you could do to fix it for the future, but at least you'll know your data isn't lost.

[yancek]

pedro_miguel

I don't know if you have resolved this issue but, if not, your 500GB external hard drive has one windows partition on it. Is that just data?

How did you try to mount that partition to get the error you posted in your original post. The error message below indicates invalid argument and also refers to sdc1 and your fdisk output shows only sda and sdb??

Failed to mount '/dev/sdc1': Invalid argument

My question from my first post was in regard to whether you had made any updates.

[nightoil]

Yancek, I was presuming he had another USB drive plugged in the first time that took /dev/sdb so the wu drive tried for /dev/sdc.

Then the 2nd time no other drive hence /dev/sdb

Regards