Unable to read windows ntfs or mount old est hdd after upgrade

Support & Help Requests
1

Dear friends,

I needed to mount an old hdd, and also, the partition named OS no longer mounts.

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                          Flags
 1      1049kB  211MB   210MB   fat32        EFI system partition          boot, esp
 2      211MB   345MB   134MB                Microsoft reserved partition  msftres
 3      345MB   114GB   114GB   ntfs         Basic data partition          msftdata
 6      114GB   164GB   50.0GB  ext4
 7      164GB   1022GB  857GB   ext4
 4      1022GB  1023GB  1122MB  ntfs                                       hidden, diag, no_automount
 5      1023GB  1024GB  1585MB  ntfs                                       hidden, diag, no_automount

There is an undescribed error on gparted on number two.
"Unable to detect filesystem! Possible reasons are:

  • The filesystem is damaged
  • The filesystem is unknown to GParted
  • There is no filesystem available (unformatted)
  • The device entry /dev/nvme0n1p2 is missing"

any ideas?

Best,
M

2

Hi, @yazdzik :slight_smile:

/dev/nvme0n1p2 is, very likely, the partition Number 2 in the output that you very nicely included in your post, which has the Name "Microsoft reserved partition" and the Flags "msftres". That one is NOT an NTFS filesystem.

So, the NTFS filesystem that you probably should try to mount instead is located in partition Number 3, which has 114 GB, the Name "Basic data partition", the Flags "msftdata" and that most likely is /dev/nvme0n1p3 in your system. You can try to mount the NTFS filesystem from that partition with commands like the following:

$ sudo mkdir /media/myntfs

$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 /media/myntfs/

It's possible (maybe even likely?) that, when you run that last command, you get the following output:

$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 /media/myntfs/
Windows is hibernated, refused to mount.
The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
or fast restarting.)
Could not mount read-write, trying read-only

... and, in that case, you probably will then find that your NTFS filesystem gets mounted "read-only" (in /media/myntfs) which, if it is your Windows OS filesystem, that may actually be a GOOD thing, since the risk of damaging it is, obviously, very reduced when the filesystem is mounted "read-only" ("ro") instead of "read-write" ("rw"):

$ mount | grep 'ntfs'
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on /media/myntfs type fuseblk (ro,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096)

Don't forget to unmount the filesystem when you're done:

$ cd

$ sudo umount -v /media/myntfs 
umount: /media/myntfs unmounted

I hope this helps :slight_smile: Please, keep us posted.

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