[ubuntu-in] mount issue

[Sanjay Bhangar]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 9:02 PM, Rtr.Atreya Roy Chowdhury
<atreya.chowdhury at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 3:10 AM, Rtr.Atreya Roy Chowdhury
> <atreya.chowdh... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> every time i try to mount one of my drives the follow crops up.
>> Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i: Zero
>> run
>> length: Input/output error
>> ntfs_attr_pread_i: Failed to find VCN #1: Input/output error
>> Failed to calculate free MFT records: 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.
>> can any one tell me how to take care of this....because all my important
>> works are in that drive...
>
> i do not have a windows operating system in my system..so have no way of
> doing chkdsk /f
>
is this an internal drive or an external drive? in either case, is it
possible to try the drive on a borrowed / friend's windows machine? I
don't have Windows on my machine either, but when I've faced this
problem, I've had to resort to finding a Windows machine to take care
of this. As I understand it, it is caused due to errors in the ntfs
file-system. In my case, the errors were almost caused due to the
drive running on a Windows machine, and since the file-system is ntfs,
I generally would think it best to try and take care of it on a
windows machine (as I would try and fix hfs drives on a mac machine
and ext3 drives on a linux machine, etc.. )

If you are completely unable to access a Windows machine, you can try
using something like ntfsfix:
sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs
man ntfsfix

As you will see the ntfsfix manual page describe, it can be used to
fix some ntfs problems, but in the end, you really want to do chkdsk
on a windows machine since it is ntfs.

If you feel like doing a bit of work, you can maybe try installing
Windows in VirtualBox or some virtual machine environment and run
chkdisk from there. I would strongly recommend trying doing exactly as
the error message you got asked you to do before messing around with
it in other ways.

Maybe others have other solutions / ideas ..

Best of luck!
-Sanjay