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ctrl_meep

Member

Registered: 2025-03-11

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Error every time I try to access my ext. hard drive.

I'm trying to access an external hard drive I have but every time I try to open it through Dolphin, I get a pop-up error that says:

An error occurred while accessing 'Passport', the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting /dev/sda1 at /run/media/benny/Passport: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error

Passport is the name of the hard drive. I read on another post that seemed to maybe be having a similar problem as me that it if the hard drive is an ntfs file system that I need to install ntfs-3g but I installed it and I'm still having the same issue. This was the output of lsblk -f:

NAME        FSTYPE FSVER LABEL    UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda                                                                                   
└─sda1      ntfs         Passport 9440F66F40F65786                                   
zram0       swap   1     zram0    a225878c-964b-49f5-8622-11a8a2df71e4                [SWAP]
nvme0n1                                                                               
├─nvme0n1p1 vfat   FAT32          4C27-24E8                             824.6M    19% /boot
└─nvme0n1p2 btrfs                 ff13dbe8-a6a2-4cfd-8108-b2d6755a5b27  909.4G     4% /var/log
                                                                                      /home
                                                                                      /var/cache/pacman/pkg
                                                                                      /.snapshots
                                                                                      /

The post I was referring to earlier also mentioned something about if the hard drive was originally created on Windows, I believe it was, I'm not completely sure though because it's really old. Additionally, this computer used to be Windows but has since been completely wiped and had Arch installed on it and I'm not dual booting.

I'd appreciate all the help I can get, some the contents of this hard drive are fairly important.

Edit: Also read somewhere that running "sudo dmesg | tail" can sometimes provide useful information, I did that it returned:

[  473.858266] rtw_8821ce 0000:02:00.0: unhandled firmware c2h interrupt
[  483.071897] rtw_8821ce 0000:02:00.0: unhandled firmware c2h interrupt
[  483.075377] rtw_8821ce 0000:02:00.0: unhandled firmware c2h interrupt
[  491.366388] rtw_8821ce 0000:02:00.0: unhandled firmware c2h interrupt
[  491.880691] rtw_8821ce 0000:02:00.0: unhandled firmware c2h interrupt
[  496.182505] rtw_8821ce 0000:02:00.0: unhandled firmware c2h interrupt
[  503.143041] rtw_8821ce 0000:02:00.0: unhandled firmware c2h interrupt
[  524.034955] rtw_8821ce 0000:02:00.0: unhandled firmware c2h interrupt
[  989.871408] ntfs3(sda1): It is recommened to use chkdsk.
[  989.935801] ntfs3(sda1): volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!

I'm new to this so I probably have no idea what I'm talking about but it seems that maybe ntfs3(sda1) is the ext. hard drive and that something is up. I'm pretty sure chkdsk means check disk which is the Windows equivalent to fsck. I ran sudo fsck because I wasn't really sure what was going on, it returned with some stuff and some prompts which I answered "No action" to on all of them because I didn't know what I was doing and I didn't want to mess anything up. It returned:

fsck from util-linux 2.40.4
fsck.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
There are differences between boot sector and its backup.
This is mostly harmless. Differences: (offset:original/backup)
  65:01/00
1) Copy original to backup
2) Copy backup to original
3) No action
[123?q]? 3
Dirty bit is set. Fs was not properly unmounted and some data may be corrupt.
1) Remove dirty bit
2) No action
[12?q]? 2
/dev/nvme0n1p1: 384 files, 50522/261628 clusters

I would assume that I should probably remove the dirty bit but I don't even know if that is related to the issue I'm having or if that's even the right move. Again, I'm extremely new and I'm kind of just trying to logic and common sense my way through this. I'm probably wrong.

Last edited by ctrl_meep (2025-03-12 13:58:09)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,164

Re: [SOLVED] Error every time I try to access my ext. hard drive.

Check your dmesg, you'll most likely find reference that ntfs3 refuses to mount it because it is marked dirty. The best way to fix that is Windows and a proper chkdsk, if you have no way to a Windows install you can "ignore" the dirty bit with

sudo ntfsfix -d /dev/sda

but this won't fix the internal inconsistency that lead to this. It will allow you to mount the drive but any lingering corruption might still be there. If you don't use Windows at all anymore it'd be best to copy over the data, verify it copied properly and then reformat the drive to a linux native FS.

ctrl_meep

Member

Registered: 2025-03-11

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Error every time I try to access my ext. hard drive.

Yeah, I think I did check my dmesg like you said while I was waiting for someone to respond, if you look, I edited my post a few minutes after your response. I ran what you suggested and was returned with:

Mounting volume... NTFS signature is missing.
FAILED
Attempting to correct errors... NTFS signature is missing.
FAILED
Failed to startup volume: Invalid argument
NTFS signature is missing.
Trying the alternate boot sector
Unrecoverable error
Volume is corrupt. You should run chkdsk.

Which seems not good, I could probably access it on a Windows device if required but it would be extremely inconvenient and I wouldn't really have a way of actually moving the files on to that computer because it has very little storage.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,164

Re: [SOLVED] Error every time I try to access my ext. hard drive.

Whoops

sudo ntfsfix -d /dev/sda1

of course, you need to run that on the partition with the FS

ctrl_meep

Member

Registered: 2025-03-11

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Error every time I try to access my ext. hard drive.

I'm able to open it, thank you. If it's not too much trouble, do you think you could clarify what the issue was and what we did to fix it? I'm really trying to actually learn what I'm doing and why so that in the future, I could solve problems on my own and maybe even help others on this forum.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,164

Re: [SOLVED] Error every time I try to access my ext. hard drive.

The dirty bit was set, this usually happens when either the system didn't shut down properly (power loss, crash, keeping power button pressed...) or the disk was janked without unmounting (... or using safe eject option in Windows) which will mark it as dirty in order to be checked by chkdsk on the next possible convenience. The in kernel ntfs3 driver will not mount such a drive by default since the internal state could be inconsistent. Since they are reverse engineered the ntfs tools on linux are fairly barebones, and ntfsfix ultimately just removes said dirty bit (without doing a proper integrity check...) while this allows you to mount the drive again, any internal inconsistency or problem should still be properly resolved by a proper chkdsk run, otherwise data corruption could occur.

Last edited by V1del (2025-03-12 14:02:23)