Cannot open my external hard drive anymore

I was using it to back up two laptops: an IBM ThinkPad running Xubuntu 11.10 with a Qimo session, and an LG R200 running Ubuntu 11.10.

I had previously backed-up both computers, several times using Deja Dup, into separate folders onto the Seagate hard drive. At one point, I copied some files directly into another folder on the Seagate, from the R200 without using Deja Dup.

I was in the process of copying some of these files again and got an error message that there was something wrong with a file and the Seagate hard drive is blocked. I tried to do a regular back up using Deja Dup and got a similar error message. The same when I tried to back up the ThinkPad.

How can I get my Seagate 2TB Expansion Drive to work again?

The error message was this or similar:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: $MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0).
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's 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 the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.

1 Answer

I had this happen recently. For me ntfsfix worked.

First, open a terminal and install ntfsprogs

sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

Then to check and fix the NTFS drive with this command:

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdb1

where /dev/sdb1 is the location of your drive.