My WD 1TB external HDD is not mounting

Question

I am getting this error when I click on devices list:

DBus error org.gtk.Private.RemoteVolumeMonitor.Failed: An operation is already pending

and when I remove the device, it says:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
The file system wasn't safely closed on Windows. Fixing.
ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: 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.
Failed to sync device /dev/sdb1: Input/output error
Failed to close volume /dev/sdb1: Input/output error

I have tried to show the disk in terminal using

sudo fdisk -l

but it is not in the list.

I can go via /media/XYZ but after giving ls command, the terminal just hangs and shows nothing.

Please help me to recover my data.

Answer 1

Your external disk is using Microsoft's NTFS file system. (Thats the default on most external disks.)

While Linux can read and write NTFS pretty good, it is not good in repairing this file system.

An unclean file system means, that the disk might be removed from a computer without a clean unmount. So not all data could be written correctly and the file system is in an unclean state.

As the message tells you: You should run chkdsk /f on Windows, and reboot into Windows again. This will most likely repair the file system.