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Hard Disk Suddenly Not Mounting

ERROR.png

INFO

Kernel: 6.9.1-artix1-1
Init: Open-rc

Hey all.

Long story short, I had a power outage a couple of days ago. My desktop is fine other than my 3 TB WD Blue hard drive, which refuses to mount for some reason. It's an ntfs3 drive, I've never formatted it and there's a good amount of precious media on there that at this point I've made peace with potentially losing. I've never had this issue before on any previous distro, but I'm about 99% sure this is an OS agnostic issue. I'm just kind of lost and letting it be until I have a clear course of action; not extremely knowledgable on this kind of thing with disk drives so hoping someone can make sense of the sudo dmesg output:

[  138.883068] ntfs3: Max link count 4000
[  138.883072] ntfs3: Enabled Linux POSIX ACLs support
[  138.883073] ntfs3: Read-only LZX/Xpress compression included
[  138.883893] ntfs3: sdb1: It is recommened to use chkdsk.
[  139.466994] ntfs3: sdb1: volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!
[  183.909355] ntfs3: sdb1: It is recommened to use chkdsk.
[  183.910895] ntfs3: sdb1: volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!
[  267.237955] ntfs3: sdb1: It is recommened to use chkdsk.
[  267.239379] ntfs3: sdb1: volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!
[  326.791854] ntfs3: sdb1: It is recommened to use chkdsk.
[  326.793311] ntfs3: sdb1: volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!
[  371.661921] ntfs3: sdb1: It is recommened to use chkdsk.
[  371.663376] ntfs3: sdb1: volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!


Thankfully I do most of my work off my SSD OS drive so my crucial data is safe at the moment - just not the backup drive :(

Thank you all so much. Love this distro a lot.

QUICK EDIT: No other operating systems are on my OS SSD - been getting away from windows entirely.

Re: Hard Disk Suddenly Not Mounting

Reply #1 –
testdisk / photorec might help:
https://www.cgsecurity.org/
Take your time and read the documentation first though, also you want to dd a copy and work on that, or use some rescue dd variant like ddrescue or dd_rescue from the Arch extra repo, there are some others in the AUR, haven't needed those myself to know which is best.
If it's a spinning disk drive in case of a hw fault there is also the option of getting one of the same model to swap the hdd pcb, which is usually removable. Then there are data recovery specialists too, if you have the money to pay them.

If you plug in a Windows formatted drive to Windows it often offers to scan and fix it if a filesystem fault is detected, it could be that simple, but try it on a copy, there's a lot of possibilities to try and they might make things better or worse!
(In the case of a hw fault if you get a copy you might only get one copy, so work on copies of the copy.)

Re: Hard Disk Suddenly Not Mounting

Reply #2 –
Additionally to what ####### said, here are some more things that might help you out :)
Using QEMU to repair NTFS:
Quote
With a disk image that contains one or more NTFS partitions that need to be chkdsked by Windows since no good NTFS filesystem checker for Linux exists, QEMU can use a raw disk image as a real hard disk inside a virtual machine:

# qemu -hda /path/to/primary.img -hdb /path/to/DamagedDisk.img
Someone with a similar problem:
Quote
Update: I was able to fix the NTFS partition running chkdsk off Hiren's BootCD, but it seems that the superblock problem still remains.

Update 2: Fixed superblock issue using e2fsck -c /dev/sda5
Or, if you have a Windows machine, the best way seems to be running chkdsk from it.

Re: Hard Disk Suddenly Not Mounting

Reply #3 –
Quote from: surethingg – on

[  138.883893] ntfs3: sdb1: It is recommened to use chkdsk.
[  139.466994] ntfs3: sdb1: volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!

QUICK EDIT: No other operating systems are on my OS SSD - been getting away from windows entirely.

Code: [Select]
sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdb1

RTFM:

man ntfsfix
man ntfsprogs
"Wer alles kann, macht nichts richtig"

Artix USE="runit openrc slim openbox lxde gtk2 qt4 qt5 qt6 conky
-gtk3 -gtk4 -adwaita{cursors,themes,icons} -gnome3 -kde -plasma -wayland "

Re: Hard Disk Suddenly Not Mounting

Reply #4 –
Quote
sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdb1
Well, it looks like there are some problems with ntfsfix:
Quote
By default, ntfsfix is used but ntfsfix isn't like the real chkdsk: it only clears the dirty bit
This clearing of the dirty bit may create bigger problems by "hiding" true ntfs problems under the rug if ntfsfix thinks it has fixed them and clears the dirty bit instead of really fixing them, Windows won't even try to do a chkdsk!
So, the safest way seems to be either using a Windows install, or using a VM and passing the drive through.
Though, indeed, most of this info can be easily found on the web :)

Re: Hard Disk Suddenly Not Mounting

Reply #5 –
Quote from: MaxLPM – on
So, the safest way seems to be either using a Windows install, ...

"Ceterum censeo M$ esse delendam"

"The best way to avoid m$-windows problems is not to use it at all."
"Wer alles kann, macht nichts richtig"

Artix USE="runit openrc slim openbox lxde gtk2 qt4 qt5 qt6 conky
-gtk3 -gtk4 -adwaita{cursors,themes,icons} -gnome3 -kde -plasma -wayland "

Re: Hard Disk Suddenly Not Mounting

Reply #6 –
I just solved this one hours ago on a new install of Artix S6 X86-64 v1.1.2.0 on a ROG Strix with 32 GB RAM ad 4 TB NVME and 8 AMD Ryzen 9  64 bit cores (16 32-bit) with NVIDIA with ATI Radeon drivers.

The original install went fine but the whole system would eventually refuse to mount hard drives randomly, even by UUID; sometimes I couldn't reboot or boot from power-off.

Booting from a Live DVD and doing an FSCK on the partitions would solve the problem for a little while but it would happen again.

Ultimately, it turned out that I was doing a standard "pacman -Syu" and accepting everything blindly.  That was fine until after I  spent some on the Web (that part is crucial) and shut down.  It wouldn't come back up without doing the FSCK thing.

The root cause turned out to be that I block IPv6 and the software loaded uses QuickTime 6, which is not native to this distro.  QuickTime says they're "...showing [their] support for IPv6" (by forcing everyone to use it, apparently).  So my PCI devices ended up with an IPv6 network address that there's no way to access, short of enabling IPv6.  (This is why I dumped Slackware and KDE.)

I keep my data on a separate drive so it was fairly simple to reload the (S6) Artix and just not do the PACMAN -Syu.  I just loaded the packages (NOT including the QuickTime dependent packages from the system update) I needed and kept blocking IPv6.  It works now.

There's was about 5 days of testing,, adding one change at a time from a virgin install and auto- re-booting about 50 times per iteration.

Now, without those QuickTime 6 dependent packages, it works fine and passes the reboot (and mount drive) tests, the shutdown test and runs all the programs (including PACMAN) as it is supposed to.

...Not a big fan of IPv6 nor QuickTime 6.  My displays, keyboards, etc., don't need an Internet address!
.
QuickTime v6 (and presumably above) requires IPv6.
I block ALL of IPv6!
I also block all Amazon, Google, Microsoft/Bing/Azure/LinkedIn/Yammer, Edgecast/Fastly/ANS Comm,  Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, as well as any other IP's which show up on my firewall (about 3% of all IPv4).  Consequently, I do NOT have email addresses nor accounts on any of these systems.  Please don't ask!

Re: Hard Disk Suddenly Not Mounting

Reply #7 –
Have you changed your name, are you the same person as the original poster, or somebody else? Very interesting anyway, never heard of that one before. Searching online shows there might be some BIOS settings for network boot and IPV4 and IPV6, I usually disable anything like that, just because it looks like a security risk if I'm not using it.