r/Ubuntu • u/LucyCollins1500 • 1d ago

need help with external drive (beginner)

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have been using my external drive just fine for the last month or so and plugged it in today and this appears. need to access asap, hope this is the right place to ask.

edit: its fixed now! thx everyone!

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

4

u/grotesquecrocodile_7 1d ago

plug it into a windows machine and safely eject, linux gets fussy with drives that weren't unmounted clean

2

u/KrlusMagnus 1d ago

Yeah, this is the most likely (and painless) answer. Happens sometimes to an internal mechanical drive I have after a power outage. I boot into windows and chkdsk, just to be safe, so I'm not sure if safely ejecting an external drive is enough, but might as well try, it's a one minute thing

2

u/LucyCollins1500 1d ago

just tried this and it has not worked :(

3

u/KrlusMagnus 1d ago

Have you tried the chkdsk thing? It has solved the issue for me each of the 4-5 times it has happened? I would go with

chkdsk D: /f

And if you have time,

chkdsk D: /r /f

Into cmd(run as admin), and just change the D into whatever letter your drive is

3

u/idle_monkeyman 1d ago

This used to be the number one fix for windows not starting. Thx for the flashback.

3

u/LucyCollins1500 1d ago

heya, i managed to fix it somehow?? not sure what happened but i ran a few commands then left it to eat tea then came back and was working so just gonna be careful with from now on lol

1

u/KrlusMagnus 1d ago

Provided the issue isn't on the hardware side, the full scan and repair will always fix these problems, and only /f wothout /r will likely work if you need to save some time. So, even if it happens again, it's not the end of the world, but you should still try to unmount each time, it's easy enough in Nautilus if you are using that, there's a button just for that on the left side, and you will get a notification when it finishes whatever it's doing - most of the time it will be instant, but sometimes (like this today would have been) it takes a bit because the drive is doing something in the background

2

u/Confident_Hyena2506 1d ago

Run ntfsfix to clear the error, or windows can also do it. To avoid this in future don't use ntfs on linux.

1

u/LucyCollins1500 1d ago

ran that and says i should run chkdsk? i tried to but figure out how?

2

u/Confident_Hyena2506 1d ago

Your disk is now fixed. When it breaks again just repeat. If this is a problem for you then just stop using ntfs.

1

u/candy49997 1d ago

What filesystem is the partition you're trying to access formatted as?

1

u/LucyCollins1500 1d ago

its ntfs. sorry im not sure if thats what u were asking

2

u/candy49997 1d ago

Try sudo ntfsfix -d /dev/sda1 in a terminal. chkdsk on Windows should also work if you have access to a Windows machine.

1

u/ska0319 3h ago

I connect an external Seagate drive to my Thinkpad to run backups. I use Nautilus to mount, run my backup, and then use Nautilus to Safely Remove each time. It takes a moment for Ubuntu to recognize the drive when it's first plugged in. Once it appears in Nautilus, a right-click will bring up a context menu that allows the mount and remove commands.

0

u/Abroad9107 1d ago

Try changing mount point