Unable to mount Expansion Drive (Solved ??)

[ff103]

plugged in my external HD to my laptop today and got this on both LXDE and KDE. This is a 320 gig Seagate drive.
Could not mount the following device:
Expansion Drive:
org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure: $MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0). Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Input/output error NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g. /dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation for more details.

any help is appreciated.

[djohnston]

In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g. /dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1).

Have you done that? The error messages are indicating a filesystem error.

[ff103]

No, I haven't done anything yet, my desktop system that I use for my business is backed up on the external drive and I am using caution doing anything. the last time I had this drive plugged into the desktop machine, it worked fine,but I won't be at that machine until tomorrow after I get off shift here.

[T6]

the error describes problems with the partition, backup everything out of that drive as soon as you can, then delete all partitions, recreate partitions and format them with a surface test to see if there is errors, this will take alot of time

after that, copy files back to the hard disk if no errors are encountered

as the messages suggests you can use chkdsk to check the partition integrity but this should be done after the backup has been done

[ff103]

Thanks for the replies every one, I didn't really solve the problem because I don't know what happened to the drive to corrupt the file system. It was working fine the last time I used it. I was able to use it on a windows partition on my laptop and I copied some files over to a dvd and then I formatted the drive to a FAT32 partition and copied the dvd back to the drive and then did another back up of my desk top system. So , all is back to where it was, but I still don't know what happened.

[T6]

a fat32 partition has a filesize limit of 4 gbs, it is not the best choice to store big files like dvd isos or similar files

it is better to use ntfs created on pclinux

the error you experienced is normal with ntfs, i work fixing windows pcs, i have seen ntfs corruption many times

multiple reasons create it but in general ntfs is not as good as ext4