Unable to mount NTFS drive

Question

I'm new to Ubuntu and am trying to re-mount my internal 3Tb hard drive. It had been working, but when I restarted the system, it wouldn't mount. I've tried every solution that Google could find, but to no avail.

Here is the disk info from sudo fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/sdb: 2.7 TiB, 3000592982016 bytes, 5860533168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: ACB16A89-1519-4F7B-A2D8-0EFC8BE92AE3

Device     Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sdb1   2048 5860532223 5860530176  2.7T Microsoft basic data

When I run sudo mount /dev/sdb /media/WDRed, I get this error:

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

The mount point does exist and gparted confirms that that the file system is NTFS.

Additionally, when I try to mount it from Disks, I get this error:

Error mounting system-managed device /dev/sdb1: Command-line `mount "/mnt/sdb1"' exited with non-zero exit status 1: mount: can't find /mnt/sdb1 in /etc/fstab
(udisks-error-quark, 0)

and when I try to make a change to the mount options from there, I get this:

Error removing old /etc/fstab entry
Didn't find entry to remove (udisks-error-quark, 0)

I'm really not sure what to do at this point; any help would be very much appreciated!

Answer 1

You can do this :

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdXY

(where X is the drive letter and Y is the partition number) on an NTFS partition. It will do its magic and leave you with a mountable NTFS drive.

Example:

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda5

Answer 2

According to Maximum Volume Sizes on microsoft.com:

One of these limitations is partition tables. By industry standards, partition tables are limited to 2^32 sectors. Sector size, another limitation, is a function of hardware and industry standards, and is typically 512 bytes. While sector sizes might increase in the future, the current size puts a limit on a single volume of 2 terabytes (2^32 * 512 bytes, or 2^41 bytes).

For now, 2 terabytes should be considered the practical limit for both physical and logical volumes using NTFS.

This may be your issue. Your volume is too large and might not be mountable under normal conditions. You may have been able to create that partition on Windows due to increased size limits.

That last article was written for Windows 2000, but here's a slightly newer article on this.

The point is, partitions larger than 2TB are starting to get support, but not everything works with them yet. I'm not sure if Ubuntu can or cannot support this yet, but you might solve your issue by reducing the size of the partition, splitting it into two maybe.

I can't test this, because I don't have a large enough drive, but this is my theory.

Either that or your don't have ntfs-3g installed.

Edit 1: You may try also increasing your sector size from 512 to 1024 or something larger. That may allow you to have a larger partition size.