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I have a 2TB seagate HDD on USB 3 that I used for backups on 15.10. When plugging it in to 16.04 I now get this message below. Does anyone know how I can get it working again? I have literally everything saved on it and cannot access it.

Thanks

Error mounting /dev/sdf1 at /media/thomas/Seagate Expansion Drive: Command-line `mount -t "ntfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=1000,gid=1000" "/dev/sdf1" "/media/thomas/Seagate Expansion Drive"' exited with non-zero exit status 13: $MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0).
Failed to mount '/dev/sdf1': 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.
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  • What filesystem is the drive in? Do you have access to Windows? If yes, do as the error message suggests. Boot into Windows and repair the drive.
    – Fiksdal
    Apr 24, 2016 at 14:59
  • Thanks, I don't have access to Windows but I do have a Mac running OS X Lion. When plugging it in to that it says it is Windows NT File System (NTFS) and it works perfectly. I can read and write to the disk, no error messages. Is there any way to make it work on 16.04? The only thing I can think is to transfer the data bit by bit on a USB stick to 16.04 and then reformat the HDD (how I don't know). Is there a way just to make it work? Thanks
    – Tom - Ubuntu UK
    Apr 24, 2016 at 15:13
  • Which format do you want to format it to?
    – Fiksdal
    Apr 24, 2016 at 15:17
  • Boot from a 15.10 Live USB to see if it works. If it does, you can copy the contents to your internal drive. Then you can format the external drive to ext4 or exFAT or something like that and then copy everything back.
    – Fiksdal
    Apr 24, 2016 at 15:21
  • 2
    Possible duplicate of askubuntu.com/questions/74105/…
    – David Foerster
    Apr 24, 2016 at 18:11

1 Answer 1

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I have found a solution. For some reason the Mac would not verify the contents of the NTFS drive, as such I can only presume there was an error or something stopping it working correctly. I copied the contents to a USB stick and then formatted the external HDD in FAT32 format (Ubuntu wouldn't recognise exFAT). It now works fine and is doing the first backup of 16.04.

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  • IF only data, you may be ok. But Windows formats do not support ownership & permissions, so those are lost. With data easy to reset. If system files you cannot use them. Also FAT32 does not support files over 4GB and does not have jounal so chkdsk may not work or work as well. Your errors as posted in links above were either from mounting partition with newer Windows and it left it hibernated or it needed chkdsk from Windows. IF not running Windows you should not use Windows formats as chkdsk periodically required.
    – oldfred
    Apr 24, 2016 at 18:36
  • Thanks, the HDD is literally only to be used as a backup disk for Ubuntu, nothing else. I have just scheduled a routine backup and let it do it's thing. I hope it will be ok, the other formats didn't seem to work for some reason. I might periodically make a secondary backup on DVDs/dropbox for the files I couldn't bear to lose. Do you think FAT32 will be ok? I won't have any files over 4gb.
    – Tom - Ubuntu UK
    Apr 24, 2016 at 19:10
  • What would you suggest as the best file format to use? I can always format and start again. It would also need to be used on Mac OS X Lion. Many thanks
    – Tom - Ubuntu UK
    Apr 24, 2016 at 19:22
  • I do not know Mac, but thought that greatly limited your choices. Generally better to use native file systems. Or for Windows use NTFS, but Linux ext4 or whatever your preference is. Not even sure what Mac uses as its native file system. Your issues before with ext4 were probably related to ownership & permissions, which you have to manually set. askubuntu.com/questions/324705/…
    – oldfred
    Apr 24, 2016 at 20:02

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