I have used Windows 7 for a long time and thought to give Linux (Ubuntu) a try. I have two hard drives, one 120GB, other 1TB. First one is for OS and software, while the 1TB disk is for data and games. So I installed Ubuntu 14.04 on the 120GB disk (sda) and have done all those 10-things-you-should-do-after-installing-ubuntu. However, it did not want to mount the 1TB disk (sdb) at all saying that it's corrupted, but after two restarts it mounted (...?). I could access all my files but as a read-only disk. I installed GParted and got this message upon right-clicking /dev/sdb1
and selecting information:
Unable to read the contents of this file system!
Because of this some operations may be unavailable.
The cause might be a missing software package.
The following list of software packages is required for ntfs file system support: ntfsprogs / ntfs-3g.
Since I've been tackling this issue for about 5 hours now, I have heard and came across ntfsprogs and ntfs-3g but have only succeeded in installing ntfs-3g. ntfsprogs refuses to install for various reasons, e.g.
command
sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs
returns
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package ntfsprogs is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package 'ntfsprogs' has no installation candidate
What should I do? How can I make it read & write? It's an NTFS file system, but it's about 50% full and I can not lose that data. Is NTFS absolutely useless in Ubuntu (or Linux generally)?
Please help
UPDATE: Windows' disk checker said everything is normal, disk has been about 1% fragmented, and therefore defragmented, but nonetheless, the problem persisted. So I took a few days off to compress everything I had on it and transfered that data to cloud storage (Apple's Time Capsule) via Windows. I formatted the disk (to NTFS) and now it's empty and it indeed IS read&write in Ubuntu. But now I have a problem of being unable to access the Time Capsule from Ubuntu. I looked it up on the internet, but there are only solutions for earlier Ubuntu.
chkdsk
from Windows?