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Re: [LUG] NTFS drive unmountable

 

On Fri, 19 Jul 2013, Philip Whateley wrote:

I have a 1TB external USB drive that I use for backups - using sbackup

I have just found that a file I overwrote cannot be restored from backup
- not critical, I can live without the file, but on testing none of the
files can be restored!!

I have been playing with back in time as an alternative: first time it
failed over permissions on some files which I changed (or excluded from
the backup)

It has now failed again (log below)


Any ideas?

It's corrupt, has failed, dead, broken, a usb drive no-more.

I'd try this:

Unplug it.

Coult to 10 & plug it back in again. Also make sure it's powered properly - preferably via an external PSU.

Run badblocks on it:

  badblocks -c 256 -s /dev/sdb

if that reports errors, then it's probably toast. You can look at using ddrescue to recover it and/or other tools, but you'll need another 1TB drive to ddrescure it onto. Depending on how toasty is it, you may be able to mount it read-only and recover some data, but really, bin it.

(After ruling out USB errors, cabling, and the other obvious stuff)

Also - why are you using ntfs? If you're backing up Linux stuff, use a Linux native format - ext3 or ext4 ...

And test that you can restore your backups before having to rely on it..

Gordon

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