Arch Linux

FlawerPawer

Member

Registered: 2024-05-04

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] External HDD won't mount anymore after reboot

Hi,

I was copying some stuff on my external HDD and shutdown my computer without unmounting the drive.
When I rebooted and wanted to mount the drive again with

udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdc1

it keeps saying

Error mounting /dev/sdc1: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.UDisks2.Error.Failed: Error mounting /dev/sdc1 at /run/media/florian/Elements: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error

.
I haven't found something on the wiki or haven't found the right page at least.
When I load up my debian machine, it reads the HDD just fine so I don't get it.

Regards!

Last edited by FlawerPawer (2024-05-04 21:38:21)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,206

Re: [SOLVED] External HDD won't mount anymore after reboot

What filesystem? Did you check dmesg? If ntfs likely the fact that ntfs3 refuses to mount a dirty (due to unclean shutdown) drive by default. Best would be to use chkdsk from Windows to bring it back into a sane state, if you don't care about that, use ntfsfix -d to clear the dirty bit without any error checking getting done.

FlawerPawer

Member

Registered: 2024-05-04

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] External HDD won't mount anymore after reboot

Hi, just checked dmesg, it indeed says that the volume is dirty and chkdsk should be used. Do I mark as solved or leave it open until further notice? Thanks already.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,206

Re: [SOLVED] External HDD won't mount anymore after reboot

That's up to you but that's generally what you should be doing and will likely fix the issue.

FlawerPawer

Member

Registered: 2024-05-04

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] External HDD won't mount anymore after reboot

Chkdsk did the trick, thanks again. Will mark as solved.

samson11

Member

Registered: 2026-05-19

Posts: 1

Re: [SOLVED] External HDD won't mount anymore after reboot

Alternate solution:

Use

lsblk

to find the device file of your HDD.
Example:

/dev/sda1

Install the required package:

sudo pacman -S ntfs-3g

Then manually mount the partition:

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /preferred_mount_location/

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,206

Re: [SOLVED] External HDD won't mount anymore after reboot

That's not generally a solution, if the device is dirty you need to ensure the integrity is properly verified, just because the ntfs-3g driver is more lenient doesn't make this a good solution in lieu of actual potential data corruption

In any case, closing this old solved thread.