Cannot Mount Internal SATA Drive

[trentreviso]

I am a complete newbie.

I just put a new motherboard in an old system with three old SATA hard drives in it. The drives were formatted ext3 under Ubuntu some years ago.

I installed Mint 17 on the SSD drive. The other two drives were working fine. But, I wanted to wipe clean one of the drives and use it only to store music. Mint would not allow me to delete anything because the permissions were created under Ubuntu long ago. No matter what I tried, I could not take ownership of the drive (I tried several tutorials from the web to no avail). So, I formatted the drive with gParted (from within Mint) as ext4, thinking I could wipe it clean that way, and take ownership since I was creating a new drive. I thought I formatted the whole drive. But, after formatting, although all data was wiped clean from the drive, there were still one large and two small partitions. So, I just deleted the two small partitions and expanded the large partition to take up the remaining space.

As soon as I did that, the drive would not mount. It no longer shows up under Menu>Computer, but it does show up under gParted. The drive is 232 GB formatted. Weirdly, gParted reports the drive as having BOTH a 232 GB ext4 extended partition AND as having 232 GB of unallocated space (which is impossible, of course).

I need to know first what I can do to get the drive mounted; and then how I can change ownership so that I can actually use it.

Thank you for your patience.

[trentreviso]

Okay, I got the drive to mount by deleting the ext4 extended partition, and then re-creating it as an ext4 PRIMARY partition. (I did not realize a primary partition was necessary, since there is no OS on this drive).

Now the drive shows up under Menu>Computer.

However, I still cannot write anything to the drive, as I do not have write permission. I need to change the ownership of this drive.

[PatH57]

ok,


you created the partition using ext4 so the drive has no longer any rights or it would not have done the formating.
Please send a screenshot of your drive in gparted

[trentreviso]

Okay, here it is.

I don't know why it says 3.84 GB of data are in use, as there does not seem to be any data on the drive. [If you look at Mint's report under drive "properties" (Menu>Computer>250 GB Drive>Properties), it says 12.6 GB of the drive is being used.]

[PatH57]

did you recreate the partition table? device create partition table? It will rebuilt the table sometimes it get's corrupted

[trentreviso]

I did not (intentionally) recreate the partition table. I assume a new partition table is generated automatically when the drive is formatted.

[PatH57]

don't assume if it is corrupted you have to recreate it

[trentreviso]

I don't know how to do that.

[PatH57]

in gparted click on the drive then on device create partition table It will rebuilt the table sometimes it get's corrupted (drive has to be unmounted)

[trentreviso]

But should I create it as an msdos partition tablle?

Ext4 has nothing to do with Microsoft (or msdos), and there is no ext4 option (or, for that matter, ext2/3).

[PatH57]

it's actually mbr (don't know why they called it msdos) once it's done you create the ext4 parttion again

[trentreviso]

Okay, I tried to recreate the partition table using the msdos format, and got an error, "Error while creating partition table."

[trentreviso]

That failed attempt seems to have destroyed the primary ext4 partition I had on the drive. gParted is now reporting 232.89 GB unallocated space.

[trentreviso]

I am going to try rebooting. Be right back.

[trentreviso]

After rebooting, the drive showed 232 GB unallocated space. I was able to create a primary partition in the unallocated space. The drive does show up under Mint, but Mint still will not give me permission to write to the drive.

[trentreviso]

I seem to have destroyed the drive by trying to change permissions.

[PatH57]

no nothing you have done coul d have destroyed the drive, it could be faulty

install testdisk (package manager) and try it

Code: Select all

sudo testdisk

[trentreviso]

Testdisk, as I understand the report, did not seem to find anything.

The ntfs information is curious, as I am almost certain this drive has never been close to a Windows computer. I don't know how to interpret that.

As it stands now, I have a ~250 GB SATA drive which will mount and show up in Mint 17. It has a single ext4 primary partition on it, without any data whatsoever. But I cannot obtain permission to write to the drive.

[PatH57]

well testdisk is able to see a bit further then normal tools like gparted...
It has found more then one type of partition. when gparted or other tools format, they only wipe the file allocation table. It would take over an hour to really format a 250GB drive.
What you need to do first is to go on with testdisk, select the first option.

once this is done, we will test the integrity of the drive.

Make sure the packet ntfs-3g is installed

there could still be a problem so in gparted recreate the partition table (device create partition table) and then create the ext partition.
Don't mount the drive.

Code: Select all
sudo apt-get install smartmontools



Code: Select all
sudo smartctl -i /dev/sdc



where /dev/sdc is your hard drive. This will give you brief information about your drive. The last two lines may look something like this:

SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled



In the case that SMART is not enabled for your drive, you can enable it by typing:

Code: Select all
sudo smartctl -s on /dev/sdc



The most useful test is the extended test (long). You can initiate the test by typing:

Code: Select all
sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sdc



To display detailed SMART information for a SATA drive, type:

Code: Select all
sudo smartctl -a -d ata /dev/sdc

[tomtiger]

Hi,

After rebooting, the drive showed 232 GB unallocated space. I was able to create a primary partition in the unallocated space. The drive does show up under Mint, but Mint still will not give me permission to write to the drive.

if it shows up in Mint issue in a terminal "ls -la /media/terry".

there should be a directory with the UUID of the drive (possbly starting with 6ab3a ...), it could have user and group set to "root".

in that case issue "sudo chown -R terry /media/terry/6ab3a...." where terry is your username and 6ab3a... is the actual UUID of the partition. Then "sudo chgrp -R terry /media/terry/6ab3a...." with the same assumption.

Then you should have full access to the drive.

HTH Tom