Unable to mount NTFS HDD

Question

I am trying to mount an external USB HDD, but it does not work. When I try to mount the drive with

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb_hdd

the response is the following error message: Failed to calculate free MFT records: No such file or directory

Same result with different mount options sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb_hdd, sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb_hdd.

I tried to fix the issue with sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda1 which outputs

Mounting volume... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Checking the alternate boot sector... OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/sda1 was processed successfully.

When mounting the same error message as above is thrown. I am looking for any advice on how to fix this issue!

Best, malluss

Answer 1

Happened to me by the past, it is likely the hard drive wasn't properly unmounted by Windows. What did the trick for me :

• boot back into Windows,
• browse the hard drive
• cleanly unmounit it (if USB), or properly shut Windows down (you may want to make sure "Fast Boot" isn't enabled in Windows' power settings)
• boot back under linux and try again.

If it's a USB disk, instead of the above you can simply attach it to any another Windows machine and "safely disconnect" the drive, this should do the trick as well.

Answer 2

Generally issues like this are fixed one of two ways.

1. Make sure the drive is properly unmounted from windows before you close it.
2. Boot into windows (or a windows VM), or a windows installer, and run CHKDSK on it.

Disable fast startup on windows to make windows properly shut down, this should be enough to make sure the drive unmounts properly when you shut down windows. This does not apply in your case because you're using an external drive.

For external drives it can only really be the CHKDSK method.

So you plug it into a windows machine (or VM), go to the this pc menu or whatever they call it these days, right click on the drive in question, go to properties and then from there you should be able to find an option to check the drive for errors and fix them, that runs chkdsk on it.

After this, whenever removing the drive from wnidows, make sure to unmount it properly by using the 'safely remove' or 'eject' functionality before unplugging it. (you should also do the same on linux).

ntfsfix is a stopgap measure, it doesn't actually fix anything, it's just a trick to ignore the errors and mount anyways, but it won't always work. CHKDSK is needed to actually fix errors, no way around it. And it unfortunately doesn't work on Linux.