Can't mount external hard drive

Question

i have a problem accessing the data on my external hard drive. I recently did a fresh install but mistakenly left my external hard drive plugged in.

When I tried to access the data on the external HDD, it says "no files" but recognizes that there is 290 GiB of data on it. The HDD is 350GB big.

I checked the drive with Disk Utility and it showed that the hard drive had a bootable flag. So, in the edit partition, I unchecked this bootablity.

Now it won't mount in Ubuntu and now my XP can't recognize it at all, whereas I could access the data on the XP machine before.

In disk utility, it doesn't give me the option to check the bootable box in again and I can't access the data on XP either.

Any ideas on how to fix it?

Answer 1

First of all, you should install a utility called GParted: # apt-get install -y gparted. After it reads the hard drive, you will have the opportunity to right click on the partition and restore the bootable flag. On a side note, the bootable flag should not interfere with the ability of Ubuntu to mount the partition.

You should try mounting the system on a LiveCD environment. (The Live CD has GParted installed by default.)

It is a Windows XP partition so I will assume that the drive is formatted as an NTFS drive. For the mount issues, at first you should check the output of # fdisk -cl. It should return some sort of output like this:

root@localdomain:/# fdisk -cl

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xbb28bb28

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        4570    36700160    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            4570        9730    41447425    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            4570        7059    19998720   83  Linux
/dev/sda6            7060        9232    17447936   83  Linux
/dev/sda7            9232        9730     3998720   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Where the /dev/sd something is the partition's identifier. To mount the partition, you will need to create a folder under the /media path, it will serve as the mount point. Execute the command # mkdir /media/external, then mount the partition with the command # mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/external, where /dev/sda1 is the identifier we retrieved from the above command output, and /media/external is the folder we just created.

(Note: Commands prefixed with a # in this answer indicate that execution requires elevated, superuser (root) privileges. Under normal circumstances, you will need to prefix all commands with sudo to authorize yourself. So # apt-get install gparted turns $ sudo apt-get install gparted. # indicates a root, $ indicates a normal terminal session.)