Question

This is a duplicated post since I didn’t get any help on askubuntu.com.

I have a 1TB external hard drive that I recently formatted to NTFS. It was mounting on my Ubuntu 11.10 fine until just now. I didn’t make any changes to affect my OS or my exhdd.

The error that I get is:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: $MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0).
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb2': 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.

I did read this and this. But neither helped.

I tried installing ntfsfix but no such package exists anymore.
I have never used this HDD on a windows machine. If I need to use an other machine to do stuff to fix this, I have access to a mac.

Any advice?

This is my sudo fdisk -l output:
What in the world is GPT? I didn’t do that. It used to be NTFS.

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000586fb

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2148   961320312   480659082+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2       961320313   976773167     7726427+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5       961320314   976773167     7726427   83  Linux

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xcfd88605

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1  1953525167   976762583+  ee  GPT

Answer 1

This is the thing that worked:

1. I first needed to get ntfs-3g (sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g)
2. Run sudo fdisk -l to figure out where the mount point is. Mine was /dev/sdb1
3. I ran ntfsfix -b /dev/sdb1 and that fixed the problem.