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I have been using an external HDD 3TB for a couple of years now. Since it was FAT32 I couldn't write big files over 4.3 GB on it. So I formatted it to NTFS. I didn't use any partitioning since I only want to store media files on it.

First I did copy-paste a large movie file to check if it's ok and there was no problem. Next day I copied a large amount of media files (about 120GB). Today when I opened my desktop it couldn't mount the hard drive and this message popped up:

Error mounting /dev/sdg2 at /media/george/3TB1: Command-line `mount -t "ntfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=0077,fmask=0177" "/dev/sdg2" "/media/george/3TB1"' exited with non-zero exit status 13: Error reading bootsector: Input/output error
Failed to mount '/dev/sdg2': 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.

After running sudo fdisk -l I got this:

Disk /dev/sdg: 3000.6 GB, 3000592965632 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 45600 cylinders, total 732566642 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 4096 = 4096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2052474d

This doesn't look like a partition table Probably you selected the wrong device.

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdg1   ?     6579571  1924427647  3376425012   70  DiskSecure Multi-Boot
/dev/sdg2   ?  1953251627  3771827541  2979336364   43  Unknown
/dev/sdg3   ?   225735265   225735274          40   72  Unknown
/dev/sdg4      2642411520  2642463409      207560    0  Empty

Partition table entries are not in disk order

I'm running ubuntu 13.10 and the formatting was done with the default "disc utility" programm. When I open it I can see the hard drive but it is not mounted. I also see 4 different partitions on my external hard drive that I didn't do. 1. Free Space 112GB 2. Partition 1 871 GB NTFS 3. Partition 2 372 GB NTFS 4. Free Space 1.6 TB

Any help would be much appreciated.

After almost a week of searching and formating in different format files I thought that the problem was I had to format the disk as GPT cuase it's over 2 TB. Ok, I did that. I've made some copy pasting, desktop restarting etc. Everything seemed to work fine for one day.

Today when I tried to acces this hard drive this message poppes up... again!

Error mounting /dev/sdd1 at /media/george/3TB: Command-line `mount -t "ext4" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid" "/dev/sdd1" "/media/george/3TB"' exited with non-zero exit status 32: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdd1,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

I've been directed to some other (supposingly doublicate) threads but I couldn't find a solution.

Here is the output of dmesg | tail

george@george-MS-7091:~$ dmesg | tail
[  919.249043] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] 732566642 4096-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB)
[  919.251026] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] No Caching mode page present
[  919.251036] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[  919.295666]  sdd: sdd1
[  919.297016] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] 732566642 4096-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB)
[  919.299020] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] No Caching mode page present
[  919.299028] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[  919.299034] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk
[  919.665826] EXT4-fs (sdd1): ext4_check_descriptors: Checksum for group 3968 failed (44912!=0)
[  919.665833] EXT4-fs (sdd1): group descriptors corrupted!

So I did a check with badblocks. After about 5 days it finally finished and NO problems were found with all 4 patterns. So I formated it again with gparted (GPT, ext4) and started to copy back files on the disk. I also did some restart several times to my computer. Some with unmounting it and some with not unmounting it and everything worked fine. Til now! I did a restart to my desktop (without unmounting any of my external drives). At shut down and start up I noticed a message which showed up for about 2 sec so I can't tell you what it said, but it was something like "could not........HID..." and at start up something like "wrong/bad argument.... /sdd drive...."

So the same problem is back again! Only to this drive. Could it be that there's a problem with Ubuntu handling large partitions? I know there are lots of issues online similar to my problem but noone seems to have a clear solution.

Should I go back to FAT32 and back up alla other files that are not over 4GB? That's quite a joke though having a 3TB disk that can handle only 4GB files...

George
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  • Try formatting the whole drive to NTFS under Windows, Copy and paste data. Check for errors. Hope that helps. – ASCIIbetical Sep 02 '13 at 15:34
  • Could you include the output of dmesg | tail when this message pops up. – Braiam Sep 07 '13 at 17:12
  • @Braiam I've just edited my post with the output you've asked for. – George Sep 08 '13 at 15:55
  • This 3GB partition is NTFA or ext4? – Braiam Sep 08 '13 at 15:59
  • It's ext4 now. I've tried it with NTFS before but got the same problems. It's 3TB not 3GB – George Sep 08 '13 at 16:37
  • Are you still not creating partition(s)? Most systems need partitions to work, otherwise it is like a floppy drive and may work for a bit, but when remounted without partitions many issues arise. – oldfred Sep 22 '13 at 20:06
  • @oldfred I was using the drive with no partitions as one usual external drive. It worked previously when it was FAT32. – George Sep 24 '13 at 17:48

0 Answers0