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I have a drive that is starting to fail. I'm using Ubuntu to try and recover files.

Right now I am running into issues. I know the files are there as yesterday, on a boot usb, I managed to mount read only and see the files. Although I couldn't access the mount because of lacking permissions.

Today I have installed Ubuntu on a drive and am not lacking permission to mount as read only. Except now when I try to mount read only it says I need to specify the file type.

How can I the file type to check the files?

Ubuntu smart data and self tests says the disk is ok but that there is one bad sector.

I just want to mount the drive So that I can get the file off of it. It's a secondary drive, no windows installed.

Any suggestion? Thanks.

The exact commands I've used so far are as follows.

To mount readonly:

sudo mkdir /media/3TB
sudo mount -o ro /dev/sdb2 /media/3T

"Mount: you must specify file system type"

To try and mount/fix the drive:

Ntfsfix /dev/sdb2 

"Mounting volume... Error opening '/dev/sdb2': Permission denied
Failed
Attempting to correct errors... Error opening '/dev/sdb2': Permission Denied
Failed
Failed to startup volume: Permission denied
Volume is corrupt. You should run chkdsk."

This is a command I found for check disk. Not sure it's right.

Fsck /dev/sdb2
"Fsck from util-Linux 2.20.1
Efsck 1.42.9 (4-few-2014)
Fsck.ext2: permission denied while trying to open /dev/sdb2

You must have r/w access to the filesystem or be root."

A.B.
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jddg5wa
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    you will need to tell the exact command you used and its exact output instead of paraphrasing. – psusi Apr 20 '15 at 22:32
  • I added the exact commands, that I have used so far, and their outputs. – jddg5wa Apr 20 '15 at 22:44
  • fsck doesn't work very well with ntfs.. If the data is critical you may want to try recovery techniques similar to this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/463076/partitions-disappeared-after-power-loss-while-installing/463094#463094 – Elder Geek Apr 20 '15 at 22:52
  • That was a great suggestion but I ran into another permission denied error. It seems I have no permissions to access the bad drive at all. I have no idea why. [!!] opening `/dev/sdb' for validation probe: Permission denied – jddg5wa Apr 21 '15 at 00:24

1 Answers1

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You got permission denied from ntfsfix because you didn't use sudo. Mount is telling you that it can't figure out what kind of filesystem it is ( which does not bode well for being able to access your filesystem at all ) and so it wants to you tell it with -t ntfs, but since it couldn't figure this out on its own, this likely won't work either because your filesystem is so damaged. In this case, you're going to have to restore from backup.

psusi
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  • I forgot that I did try it once with sudo. It told me "Sudo: ntfsfix: command not found." I tried again just now and got this same error. Also does it mean anything. When I get the error that I can't access all files because the drive won't mount it says "the ntfsfix partition is in and unsafe state". It seems to know what file type it is there. Why wouldn't it in terminal? – jddg5wa Apr 20 '15 at 22:51