USB hdd not accessible... [SOLVED]

[OleWilly]

Hi blackbird

I am sure that they hold danish characters like æ ø å. But to be 100 % sure I will boot in Windows and look for that. Thank You for the reply and I will back. I would not have come to this myself. I really hope that it is the mysterious problem.

OW 

[Bald Brick]

And OleWilly,

I really think we should test whether your drive can be mounted manually with ntfs-3g installed.

To that end, you first have to create a temporary mountpoint. As root enter the following in a terminal:

Code: [Select]

mkdir  /mnt/usbdrive
If you prefer the GUI, you can of course create the mountpoint in Konqueror or Dolphin too -- it's just an empty directory. (I'd rather create it under /mnt instead of under /media so as not to confuse it with mountpoints created by HAL.)

Then:

Code: [Select]

mount  -t ntfs-3g  /dev/dev/sdb1  /mnt/usbdrive
This should mount your drive without any extra options.

Then check /mnt/usbdrive. Can you see the contents of all directories? Can you write to the drive?

[OleWilly]

Hi blackbird

BRAVO!    You were right. I booted in Windoze and changed all the danish characters æ to ae and ø to oe and å to aa in one folder. There were a lot of them danish signs. - Booted in PCLinuxOS kernel 4 and I could again see that folder. Thanks for all the help!

OW 

[ElCuervo]

See? I told you so!

Glad blackbird can exercise critical thinking (I woulda never thunk of that answer!), and glad it is solved for you!

[Bald Brick]

Hi blackbird

BRAVO!    You were right. I booted in Windoze and changed all the danish characters æ to ae and ø to oe and å to aa in one folder. There were a lot of them danish signs. - Booted in PCLinuxOS kernel 4 and I could again see that folder. Thanks for all the help!

OW  

I'm glad it worked. Let's hope the fix survives a couple of reboots.

I suspect that the character encoding in your system is set up properly for utf8, while the files were created before that became a default -- which doesn't have to be very long ago if they were created in Windows. Then the locale=da option in some of the mount lines probably confused the system even more. But this is speculation.

You should naturally be able to use æ, ø and å in file names. However: if you now restore the Danish characters in PCLinuxOS they will probably work in Linux, but God knows what they will look like in Windows. Defining another encoding for your USB drive may solve the problem, but if you can live with ae, oe and aa, I wouldn't bother.

[OleWilly]

Hi

I am using dual boot win xp and pclinuxos. When I was in win xp I suddenly discovered that the danish letters æøå were wrong. I tried to change the keyboard, but that did not help. So I reinstalled win xp and after that pclinuxos and made fully update. And I still can not open folders with danish special letters in them on my usb hdd. That is, I can if I do not update ?   . In win xp I can open the folders and see everything. - In one folder I changed all the danish letters æøå to international letters, that was in win xp, and then I could open the folder in pclinuxos.    I find it extremely mysterious. What can cause this problem emerging by an update.  
Also in Puppy Linux, Fedora, Sidux and others I can see the folders content without any trouble on this machinery.

OW  

[hankcurt]

I did some reading on the character encoding problems with NTFS-3G.  I don't really understand the whole issue, but you might try adding the locale for the Danish character set to the mount options for your usb hdd.

So add locale=da_DK or try adding locale=da_DK.utf8 to the mount options in fstab and see if the character set starts getting interpreted correctly.

From what I read, there was a change in the way NTFS-3G handles character sets and that is why it is failing after the update.

[OleWilly]

Hi

All these problems have disappeared after I installed PCLOS Gnome 2010 beta with the latest kernel !

OW