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I have an external 10Tb Seagate drive. It's an NTFS drive with two partitions as the factory default. I've been mounting it on my Ubuntu 18.04.03 server. Today it stopped working. I tested it on my other Linux box and it mounts fine.

On my server, here's the fdisk -l entry:

The backup GPT table is corrupt, but the primary appears OK, so that will be used.
Disk /dev/sdc: 9.1 TiB, 10000831348224 bytes, 19532873727 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: D8EE6550-DE3E-472E-AC52-9E16518097F0

Device      Start         End     Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sdc1      34      262177      262144  128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sdc2  264192 19532871679 19532607488  9.1T Microsoft basic data


Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.

When I try sudo mount /dev/sdc2 /media/seagate it executes without any errors, but then ls /media/seagate/ returns nothing and a df -h shows it as unmounted.

dmesg shows

sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Spinning up disk...
[819935.907806] usb 1-1-port2: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?

(The USB cable is the one that shipped with the drive and works on my other box. But I tried using a different port on the server). Then a bunch of empty lines, then:

[819955.420373] ready
[819955.420705] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] 19532873727 512-byte logical blocks: (10.0 TB/9.09 TiB)
[819955.446378] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
[819955.446383] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 4f 00 00 00
[819955.446544] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[819955.446748] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Optimal transfer size 33553920 bytes
[819955.536627] Alternate GPT is invalid, using primary GPT.
[819955.536635]  sdc: sdc1 sdc2
[819955.537583] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk
[820292.456857] blk_partition_remap: fail for partition 2
[820292.456864] Buffer I/O error on dev sda2, logical block 786545, async page read

The weirdest thing of all is that when I use sudo mount /dev/sdc2 /media/seagate on the server, it mounts fine! Both of those directories exist in my /media folder. I've tried deleting and recreating them. Same problem.

I want it mounted to /media/seagate because that's where various things on my system point to.

Can anyone help me understand why it's mounting to one folder but not another? Also why is the buffer I/O error affecting sda2, not sdc2, when I'm mounting sdc2?

RubyNoob
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    Did you repair the gpt table issue? repair gpt:http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/repairing.html More repair info use p, v & w to write the partition table. If not correct just use q to quit. http://askubuntu.com/questions/386752/fixing-corrupt-backup-gpt-table/386802#386802 Why NTFS, you need Windows to run Windows fixes as Linux cannot repair NTFS. And if mounted with Windows it may turn on fast start up which sets hibernation flag and prevents auto mount in Linux. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1288661/windows-10-doesnt-start-after-setting-up-dual-boot-with-ubuntu-20-04/1288764#1288764 – oldfred Nov 26 '20 at 18:14
  • @oldfred thanks for the input. I copied my data to another drive, reformatted and repartitioned my problem Seagate as ext4, and copied all my data back again. Now the gpt and physical sector boundaries errors are gone. But what's weird is that I still can't mount my Seagate drive to /media/seagate. I can mount it to /media/external, however. Why on earth would my server allow one name and not the other? I've tried deleting and recreating the /media/seagate dir but to no avail. I guess I'll have to change my fstab to mount to /media/external and point my scripts to it. I wish I knew why tho. – RubyNoob Nov 27 '20 at 21:20
  • Did you create the mount point /media/seagate? As mount point has to exist first to be able to mount a partition. And then you have to have ownership & permissions. NTFS always used default permissions from mount in fstab or manually. Post these: sudo cat /etc/fstab and ls -l /media – oldfred Nov 27 '20 at 22:57
  • @oldfred here/s my fstab:

    UUID=a45d6d3e-80f1-4eaf-b5d0-283970624679 / ext4 defaults 0 0 UUID=DEC9-0F4E /boot/efi vfat defaults 0 0 /swap.img none swap sw 0 0 /dev/sdc1 /media/external ext4 defaults 0 0 192.168.1.73:/mnt/HD/HD_a2/Public /mnt/public nfs defaults 0 0

     – RubyNoob Nov 30 '20 at 15:32
  • and my /media dir:

    drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 19 03:27 backup drwx------ 10 danny danny 4096 Nov 27 20:58 external drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 27 21:27 seagate

    Looks like you're right about the permissions issue, given the difference in ownership between external (the only thing I can mount to) and the other dirs. Thanks for this - I will go and do some reading.

     – RubyNoob Nov 30 '20 at 15:32
  • Better to post terminal output in question, so you can maintain formatting & make it easier to read. See: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1013677/storing-data-on-second-hdd-mounting/1013700#1013700 & details: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FilePermissions – oldfred Nov 30 '20 at 15:44

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