n00b usb hard drive problem

English Hardware
#1

in opensuse 11 w/ kde 3.5 I cannot access my external USB hard drive formatted in ntfs. It always worked fine in 10.3 and also worked in 11/kde4 (but I just didn’t care for 4). Anyway, I get this message:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so

The only advise I can find is to run dmesg, so I ran dmesg in konsole and all I got was a lot of crap about my wireless tcp/ip. Nothing useful.

I was careful to disconnect the drive in question before I installed the OS, so that’s not the problem. Has anyone found a solution to this?

#2

I experienced the same on my openSUSE-11.0 with my Seagate Free Agent 500GByte drive (formated as ntfs).

But the drive still mounts manually with no problem.

#3

I read that it sometimes has something to do with the “clean” parameter. So try rebooting to windows and running chkdsk. Or use the “force” parameter in the line you have infstab for the mount, like this:

/dev/sda2 /mnt/winxp ntfs-3g uid=1000,gid=100,umask=0022 0 0

you would add it like this:

/dev/sda2 /mnt/winxp ntfs-3g uid=1000,gid=100,umask=0022,force 0 0

#4

Thanks, will try that.

I don’t have my external drives in the fstab. It looks like 11.0 was trying to hotplug auto-mount with the ntfs driver.

I may also try (I haven’t tried yet) to put a symbolic link in the /sbin directory with:
sudo ln -s mount.ntfs-3g mount.ntfs
… to force a mount with the ntfs-3g driver. If it doesn’t work, or if it makes things worse, I’ll remove it.

#5

Thanks for the help.

I did try running chkdsk in windows and everything was ok. But as far as changing anything in fstab, I wouldn’t know where to begin… time to start reading :slight_smile:

#6

You can safely look at the contents with this console command

cp /etc/fstab /home/your_username/Desktop/file.txt

Then you open it and read it in a text editor like gedit or kwrite

To actually edit/change it, you would use a command like this for KDE:

kdesu kwrite /etc/fstab

or in Gnome

gnomesu gedit /etc/fstab

For more on mounting NTFS FYI: HowTo Mount NTFS Filesystem Partition Read Write Access in openSUSE

#7

As you have mentioned about your Seagate Free Agent drive, i want to ask a suggestion from you. Is is worth to format this drive with other linux file systems ? (to speed up the writing process)?

#8

It depends on your use. I need an external hard drive that works with any OS. Hence I need to leave it in NTFS.

#9

On 2008-06-21, blah-blah blah <blah-blah_blah@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

> I did try running chkdsk in windows and everything was ok. But as far
> as changing anything in fstab, I wouldn’t know where to begin… time
> to start reading :slight_smile:

Forget about fstab, for removeable drives. It’s possible to add some
options, but the drive should be accessible without it.

Don’t know if it’ll help, but try getting it mounted with ntfs-3g, rather
than ntfs:

cd /sbin
sudo ln -s mount.ntfs-3g mount.ntfs

–
The sand remembers once there was beach and sunshine
but chip is warm too
– haiku from Effector Online, Volume 1, Number 6

#10

same problem here with both the laptops where i installed 11 kde 3.5.9.
Two of my hard drives have a NTFS partition and a FAT32. The latter is mounted with no problems while the NTFS returns the error

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so

As Oldcpu said, it can be accessed manually.
My “lazy solution” (which is not a real solution) so far has been only adding an alias in bashrc, with the following

alias mountusb='sudo mount -t ntfs -o umask=0 /dev/sdc1 /media/usb_ntfs/'
alias umountusb='sudo umount /dev/sdc1'

This wont work in case other devices are mounted first, as that partition wont be listed as device sdc1.

I had saved the fstab on the same machines for 10.3 and it is identical to the one in 11, so it is not a fstab problem, as pointed out here above in this thread.
Curious issue anyway, isnt it

#11

to use ntfs-3g , there is a very easy configuration utility “ntfs-config”
It will allow you to mount internal and external ntfs partitions on the mode you specify i.e. either with write support or without write support.

its one the opensuse OSS repo:
here is the one-click install for opensuse11

http://api.opensuse-community.org/searchservice//YMPs/openSUSE_110/9a02edf635681c48eb8c44cca9d730c4dc6bb38a

#12

I have the same problem on openSUSE 11 and it worked perfectly on 10.3.
Do openSUSE team have plans to correct this bug so we can mount usb ntfs hardrives automatically when it is plugged?

#13

The openSUSE team have been trying to fix this properly, but thus they have not been completely successful.

I was told of a work around, and I applied to to my openSUSE-11.0 PC and it works well for me. In essence, it is setting up a symbolic link such that your external USB NTFS formated drive is mounted with the NTFS-3G driver and hence also has Read/Write permissions. If you wish to try the work around, then do the following in an xterm/konsole (with regular user permissions):

cd /sbin
sudo ln -s mount.ntfs-3g mount.ntfs

Thats it. Thats all. Now try hotplug mounting your NTFS formated hard drive. It works for me, …hopefully it will for you.

#14

Hi oldcpu,

Thanks for the tip.

I’ve tried your workaround and now it works fine for me too!