Help mounting/recovering old HDD

Support
1

I have a 20 year old NTFC HDD I was playing around with, that suddenly stopped working before I duplicated the files. Now upon mounting, I get the error:

The requested operation has failed: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting /dev/sdc1 at /run/media/serval/Seagate 300: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error

When running smartctl I get:

sudo smartctl -l error /dev/sdc                                           
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-6.6.16-2-MANJARO] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, 
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdc                                                           ✔ 
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-6.6.16-2-MANJARO] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, 

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 0
Warning: ATA Specification requires self-test log structure revision number = 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     25324         -

Not sure how to proceed with getting this drive starting again. How would you recommend I extract the files from this HD? Thanks so much.

Moderator edit: In the future, please use proper formatting: [HowTo] Post command output and file content as formatted text

2

Hi @implicatedmushroom, and welcome!

I’d do, and recommend, using testdisk:

I think that’s your best bet, honestly…

3

There are many previous posts like this if you search “bad superblock”.

Short version - use ntfs-3g instead of the default ntfs kernel driver. Reboot required after doing this.

$ sudo pacman -S ntfs-3g
$ echo 'blacklist ntfs3' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/disable-ntfs3.conf
4

Sadly, I still get the same error after installing ntfs-3g. :confused:

5

If you cannot mount the device - there is no way of accessing the content.

ntfs is a proprietary filesystem - Linux drivers are reverse engineered.

The kernel driver ntifs3 will refuse to mount if the file system has errors.

The user-space driver ntfs-3g may be more relaxed but the issue may have deeper roots.

Your absolute best choice is to boot into Windows and repair the file system.

If you do not have access to a Windows installation you can use Download | Hiren's BootCD PE copied to a ventoy prepared USB device.

2 Likes
6

If it still won’t mount with ntfs-3g then it’s not a simple error and you’ll need proper Windows chkdsk as @linux-aarhus has explained.

2 Likes
7

Thank you very much. I’ll try booting into Windows once I get home.