You are not logged in.
I have an NTFS external hardrive and the ntfs-3g package.
Offline
you sudo mount how and it fails how? exact commands and error messages.
General guess it hinges on the difference that ntfs-3g is more lenient on which filesystems it mounts and ntfs3 which is the in kernel driver -- and the default for udisks based mounts dolphin would be doing -- will not mount a dirty FS, you'll see a message along these lines in dmesg.
Run a chkdsk from Windows on the faulty drive, reboot and try to reproduce.
Offline
I insert the USB and the "Disk & Devices" menu pops up. I click "mount and open" and it replies "could not mount this device". However, when I do "sudo fdisk -l" to find the disk path and then "sudo mount <something like /dev/sda1> /mnt/usbdrive" it works. I ran "journalctl -r" shortly after plugging in the device and I see "ntfs3(sdb1): volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!", so it looks like your guess was right.
Do I need a Windows device to fix it?
I guess I'll look for an alternative external harddrive to place all of the data on while I format it to another file system.
Offline
Do I need a Windows device to fix it?
chkdsk is generally recommended to fix NTFS integrity.
ntfsfix from the ntfs-3g package can remove the dirty bit, but while sometimes it's just stale from an unclean shutdown of a synced filesystem, that does not guarantee that the FS is ok.
Why would you use NTFS if you don't have access to a windows system?
Offline