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I had a power supply failure on my old machine which seems to have taken out the motherboard and hard drive. Luckily, I had backed up my important data to a Seagate FreeAgent drive. I bought a new machine and have both windows 7 and ubuntu 18.04 on it. However, neither seems to be able to access the drive. Both systems seem to recognize that it exists, but it doesn't mount. I've tried

ls /dev/ | grep sd

with both the drive inserted and not, making sure it was the only usb device other than mouse and keyboard. The drive seems to be 

sdb

The relevant output of 

sudo fdisk -l

is

Disk /dev/sdb: 232.9 GiB, 250059349504 bytes, 488397167 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Trying to follow along with the Ubuntu help page, I tried 

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb /media/external

The output is:

NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb' 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?

How should I proceed?

Edit: Thanks for the help! As suggested, tried 

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /media/external

which produced ntfs-3g: Failed to access volume '/dev/sdb1': No such file or directory

ntfs-3g 2017.3.23 integrated FUSE 28 - Third Generation NTFS Driver
    Configuration type 7, XATTRS are on, POSIX ACLS are on

along with some copyright notices. I then tried 

parted --list

which produced

Warning: Unable to open /dev/sr0 read-write (Read-only file system). /dev/sr0
has been opened read-only.
Error: /dev/sr0: unrecognised disk label
Model: MATSHITA DVD+-RW SW820 (scsi)                                      
Disk /dev/sr0: 77.2MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 2048B/2048B
Partition Table: unknown
Disk Flags:

If I try 

lsblk

I get

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT loop0 7:0 0 3.7M 1 loop /snap/gnome-system-monitor/51 loop1 7:1 0 140.9M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-26-1604/70 loop2 7:2 0 2.3M 1 loop /snap/gnome-calculator/260 loop3 7:3 0 140.7M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-26-1604/74 loop4 7:4 0 86.9M 1 loop /snap/core/4917 loop5 7:5 0 14.5M 1 loop /snap/gnome-logs/45 loop6 7:6 0 195.2M 1 loop /snap/vlc/555 loop7 7:7 0 13M 1 loop /snap/gnome-characters/139 loop8 7:8 0 88.2M 1 loop /snap/core/5897 loop9 7:9 0 34.6M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/818 loop10 7:10 0 34.7M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/319 loop11 7:11 0 3.7M 1 loop /snap/gnome-system-monitor/57 loop12 7:12 0 14.5M 1 loop /snap/gnome-logs/37 loop13 7:13 0 2.3M 1 loop /snap/gnome-calculator/180 loop14 7:14 0 13M 1 loop /snap/gnome-characters/103 sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk ├─sda1 8:1 0 100M 0 part ├─sda2 8:2 0 233.1G 0 part ├─sda3 8:3 0 1K 0 part └─sda5 8:5 0 232.6G 0 part / sdb 8:16 0 232.9G 0 disk sr0 11:0 1 73.7M 0 rom /media/zvacanti/setup

The drive is still connected, so I'm not sure why I don't see it there. I DO see it in the disks utility, or at least something labeled "sdb". The disk wasn't plugged in when the system crashed, I made the backup and then just put it away in a drawer.

Zack Vacanti-Mitchell
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1 Answers1

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The devil is in the details of the output, especially:

Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)

so you're trying to mount a disk, not a partition so instead do a:

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /media/external

to mount the first 1 partition on the second disk sdb (sdb1) and if that fails, do a:

parted --list

and take the number(s) that shows up for sdb as you might have multiple partitions on one disk. (In Windows speak: multiple drives on one disk)

If the drive would have been attached while the machine crashed (It shouldn't have been, that's what we call offline backups) try this.

Fabby
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