Internal HDD not mounted by Mint 21 Cinnamon

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mcdaver1
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Internal HDD not mounted by Mint 21 Cinnamon

Post by mcdaver1 »

Hi,
I need some help getting my internal 1TB HDD mounted in Mint. I just installed Mint 21 x64 with Cinnamon in a multiboot system. Linux Mint boots fine and mounts the two other SSD drives I have. The 1TB HDD is seen but is not mounted. It is a NTFS disk. Below is what is shown with parted -l. The red section is the disk that doesn't mount which is dev/sdb 1000GB disk. It mounts fine when I boot into Windows and also mounts fine in Ubuntu 20.04. I've searched forums and internet to find a similar issue, but have not found anything. I have Windows quick boot off. I also see in the "Disks" application as well as "Parted" reports the partition table as "LOOP". Not sure why that is. Is there something somebody can guide me to do to get this drive mounted in Mint 21?

I previously had Ubuntu 18.04 and decided to install Mint 21 over it. Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 as well as Windows 10 have had no issues reading and writing to the 1TB drive. The three bootable Operating Systems I have are each on separate physical disks. The 1TB disk is strictly a data disk and no OS is installed on it. I have Mint 21, Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 currently. Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 continue to mount and work with the 1TB drive without issue.

I've also tried using
sudo ntfs-3g /dev/sdb /mnt/NTFS1TB
it returns the message ntfs-3g-mount: failed to access mountpoint /mnt/NTFS1TB: No such file or directory.

Any help or something to try would be appreciated.

Output from "Parted -l" command

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Model: ATA Crucial_CT275MX3 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 275GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                  Flags
 1      1049kB  2097kB  1049kB                                     bios_grub
 2      2097kB  540MB   538MB   fat32        EFI System Partition  boot, esp
 3      540MB   275GB   275GB   ext4
Model: ATA WDC WD10EZEX-08W (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: loop
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size File system Flags
1 0.00B 1000GB 1000GB ntfs


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Model: ATA SATA SSD (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 240GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size   File system  Name                  Flags
 1      1049kB  538MB  537MB  fat32        EFI System Partition  boot, esp
 2      538MB   240GB  240GB  ext4

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Model: PCIe SSD (nvme)
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 256GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size   Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  106MB  105MB  primary  ntfs         boot
 2      106MB   256GB  255GB  primary  ntfs
 3      256GB   256GB  547MB  primary  ntfs         msftres
Last edited by LockBot on Mon May 15, 2023 10:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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spamhog
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Re: Internal HDD not mounted by Mint 21 Cinnamon

Post by spamhog »

failed to access mountpoint /mnt/NTFS1TB: No such file or directory
appears to say the mountpoint doesn't exist as a folder within /mnt, and say nothing abut permissions.
The mountpoint folder must exist before the mount command.
In other installs you or the installer might have
- created the folder
- taken care of permissions
- added a line in /etc/fstab which makes things easier.

To make the mountpoint:

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sudo mkdir <full path>
needs not be in /mnt
it could be ~/NTFS1TB
(~ translates into /home/user/)
or /NTFS1TB
so it could be

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mkdir ~/NTFS1TB
or

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sudo mkdir /NTFS1TB
.

If /NTFS1TB, I would also brutally do, befor mount

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sudo chown user:user /NTFS1TB
to make sure I can access THE FOLDER.

To make mount possible without root, add a line to /etc/fstab/

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UUID=<partition UUID>        /NTFS1TB     ntfs-3g   user,noauto,rw 0 2
- noauto means the partition will not mount at boot
- user means you can mount it manually
- UUID from

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ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid
- rw will try to mount read-write
- 0 2 is superstition, I can't explain correctly

Once that is done, to mount and unmount a user mountable partition I use .desktop buttons:

E.g. mount-NFTS1TB.desktop

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#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Exec=<terminal emulator> -e 'bash -c "mount /NFTS1TB; df -h; sleep 4; exit"'
Icon=mintupload
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name[en]=windows ON
GenericName=windows ON
Comment[en]=windows ON
StartupNotify=false
E.g. windows-OFF.desktop

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#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Exec=<terminal emulator>  -e 'bash -c "umount /NFTS1TB; df -h; sleep 4; exit"'
Icon=hexchat
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name[en]=windows OFF
GenericName=windows OFF
Comment[en]=windows OFF
StartupNotify=false
There may be complications with any-user write access to Windows folders, discussed here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/113733/ ... -etc-fstab
In this thread there's a suggestion to do

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sudo chown -R user:user /NTFS1TB
but I am not sure it's a good idea, as I don't know how it will affect permission seen from Windows.
Probably the other solution is better:

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UUID=<uuid>    <mountpoint>     ntfs-3g    nls=utf8,umask=000,dmask=027,fmask=137,uid=1000,gid=1000,windows_names   0   0
but for me it's superstition and I can't claim I understand it.
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AndyMH
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Re: Internal HDD not mounted by Mint 21 Cinnamon

Post by AndyMH »

You might also consider reformatting the drive. You have managed to put a filesystem on the drive without a partition table. I'm surprised windows works with it. Suspect you used disks to format it. The clues, partition table is loop and first and only partition starts at zero.

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Model: ATA WDC WD10EZEX-08W (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: loop
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size File system Flags
1 0.00B 1000GB 1000GB ntfs
You can use gparted, put a partition table on the drive, doesn't matter, msdos or GPT, this will wipe the drive and then create a partition with your filesystem of choice, this will be sdb1.
Thinkcentre M720Q - LM21.3 cinnamon, 4 x T430 - LM21.3 cinnamon, Homebrew desktop i5-8400+GTX1080 Cinnamon 19.0
mcdaver1
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[Solved] Re: Internal HDD not mounted by Mint 21 Cinnamon

Post by mcdaver1 »

Thanks for the help from both AndyMH and Spamhog for thoughts of what is going on with the mount problem. I forgot how I setup this 1TB drive several years ago, but it probably was with the Disks application. I thought the fresh install of Linux would recognize the drive and mount it automatically since the installers these days seem to detect and setup just about everything.

I forget why I setup the drive this way, but it does work with Windows and Linux. Permissions don't seem to be any issue. The one thing I knew I had to do was make sure I set Windows to shutdown completely (disable fast startup) otherwise Linux will complain when trying to mount the drive. I have the disk now mounting automatically at startup. I've tested read/write operations in Windows, Ubuntu 20.04, Mint 21 and all seems okay. This 1TB drive stores my data for my Steam games amongst some other shared content.

What I did is create the folder /mnt/NTFS1TB and gave it create and delete permissions for the user group. I then added the following to the fstab file.
/dev/disk/by-uuid/2A3.....9A42AD /mnt/NTFS1TB auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0

Now upon bootup the 1TB drive mounts and shows up on my Cinnamon desktop for easy access. I might consider doing a reformat/partition as AndyMH suggests, but as long as its working now I probably will just leave things as is. I wish I could remember why I originally setup this drive the way I did.

We can consider this issue resolved. Thanks!!!
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AndyMH
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Re: Internal HDD not mounted by Mint 21 Cinnamon

Post by AndyMH »

I forgot how I setup this 1TB drive several years ago, but it probably was with the Disks application.
How do I know? I made the same mistake a few years back. When you buy a bare drive it is blank. I formatted mine ext4 and then tried to use it as a timeshift destination, timeshift refused to have anything to do with it. If you use gparted instead of disks, it will not let you create partitions without a partition table.

Disks makes messy entries in fstab, instead of:

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/dev/disk/by-uuid/2A3.....9A42AD /mnt/NTFS1TB auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0
simpler

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UUID=2A3.....9A42AD   /mnt/NTFS1TB    ntfs   defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000,nofail    0    0
win filesystems do not support linux permissions, the uid=1000,gid=1000 is telling mint who the owner is (an ID of 1000 is assigned to the first user created = you). I also think it is better to specify the filesystem, ntfs, rather than have linux guessing with auto.
Thinkcentre M720Q - LM21.3 cinnamon, 4 x T430 - LM21.3 cinnamon, Homebrew desktop i5-8400+GTX1080 Cinnamon 19.0
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