External HDD fails to mount

Hi, my computer is refusing to mount my external HDD after trying to set it to auto-mount using the Plasma GUI method shown in this screenshot.


As I only just installed OpenMandriva a few days ago, I can’t remember for sure if I’ve attached this HDD (The “Liam’s Gameplay” one) to the PC yet since installing it; so I’m not 100% sure if the auto-mount option being enabled was the cause of the problem.

Either way, I cannot mount “Liam’s Gameplay” at all anymore, even if I un-tick the options I’ve selected in the screenshot above.

This is the error I get when I attempt to mount the HDD by clicking it in Dolphin:

The HDD is using the NTFS file system, which I use so that it can be plugged into Windows computers and accessed without a problem, and I’ve never had any issues with that on any of my former Linux distributions. So I don’t believe the filesystem is the cause.

Restarting the PC doesn’t seem to resolve it either.

Possibly related issue: Before having this issue, I attempted to set auto-mount for my internal HDD “Linux Storage” too (this is separate to my root) and upon restarting the computer, it did not auto-mount when it was supposed to. This could be because the “Linux Storage” drive is encrypted, I’m not sure. But the “Liam’s Gameplay” drive this post is about is not encrypted.

System Configuration:

  • OpenMandriva Lx 25.01 (ROME) Rolling | AMD CPU (newer than 2017)
  • Desktop Environment: KDE Plasma 6
  • Display Server: Wayland

Hardware:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6600
MB: MSI MPG B550 Gaming Edge WiFi

1 Like

Probably related: Problemi mount partizione Windows 11
Use online translator if needed.

1 Like

Thankyou. The solution found in that persons post doesn’t work for me. I forgot about the ntfsfix command. I think I used it on the same drive a couple of years ago when I was having a similar issue, and the referenced post reminded me of that.

However, what does allow me to mount the drive is doing it manually through the terminal, as suggested in that post here, using the command sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdc1 /mnt/.

This doesn’t fix the issue though. Because if I plug the HDD out and back in again, and try to select it in Dolphin to mount it, I still get the same error as before. I tried turning off auto-mount options before plugging the HDD in and out again as well, but that didn’t seem to do anything; I still get the same error.

So for now I can at least access the files on the HDD, but it’s inconvenient to have to manually mount it in the terminal every time.

1 Like

@rugyada Something else to note that I just noticed. The /mnt/ directory requires me to Act as Administrator to access it.


I’m not sure why Dolphin attempted to let me into /mnt/ at all; maybe it was something to do with me doing the command sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdc1 /mnt/ earlier?

Is it normal for it to require Administrator access? I’m not actually quite sure exactly where on the system /mnt/ is located. I would assume this means that /mnt/ is owned by root. Could that be related to why I get the error when trying to access “Liam’s Gameplay” by clicking it in Dolphin? Perhaps Dolphin itself doesn’t have full access to root-owned directories?

But maybe Dolphin’s access isn’t the issue, because I’m able to browse the root directory just fine.

1 Like

That’s the normal mount-point. It’s also where my “Linux Storage” internal HDD mounts to.

I went to this folder (/media/mandriva) (the same place as in your screenshot) to see what would happen when I try to click “Liam’s Gameplay” in the sidebar in order to mount it. What happened while it was attempting to mount, was that the “Liam’s Gameplay” directory momentarily appeared for a few milliseconds in the /mandriva directory - that is, the mount point it’s supposed to mount to. But after a few milliseconds it disappears again. This means that the system is trying to mount Liam’s Gameplay to /media/mandriva, but it simply can’t due to that error. Something I did notice that may be important, is that in the few milliseconds the directory momentarily appears in /media/mandriva, the directory has one of those little orange lock icons on it.

Perhaps this means the Liam’s Gameplay drive is owned by root? If that’s the case, this may be a similar issue to what I was asking help with yesterday with my “Linux Storage” drive. But I can’t use this command I was suggested to use to see which user owns the directory because it won’t work unless the drive is actually already mounted.

Not sure; it was just a suspicion I thought was worth bringing up. You know, just in case it was related to the issue.

I do have my old laptop. I’ll have to get it out of my wardrobe and I’ll give it a try.

Run this command:
sudo dnf in ntfs* lib64ntfs*

If you are still having permission issues with the mount point:
With the drive plugged in, but not mounted, launch KDE Partition Manager. Select your drive in the list of devices. Right click on the partition under the list of partitions, and select Edit Mount Point. At the top of this page, select UUID. Choose your Path. Under Options select “Don’t prevent the system from booting if not mountable”, “Users can mount and unmount”, make sure Dump and Pass are set to 0, and click OK. This will add that drive to your /etc/fstab, and mount it automatically at boot, but not when plugged in, that will still be manually done. I think that should fix your permission issues.

@LeeTalbert might be right. Those packages are not installed on my system. I have not had to install them in so long, that I had forgotten that they might not be installed by default. You may or may not have them.

I tested it out, and it mounts just fine on the Windows 10 laptop, and I can access all it’s files.

Also, I just realised: I don’t know why I just went on that tangent about file permissions, because I already mentioned earlier that I can manually mount the drive using sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdc1 /mnt/, and that I can access and read/write any of the files in the drive.

I was able to use the command sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdc1 /mnt/ again, to mount it. Although this time, for some reason the Liam’s Gameplay drive is now classed as sdd1, not sdc1, so I had to change the command accordingly. From there, I accessed the properties of a file on the drive, and opened the “permissions” tab. As you can see, the file is owned by root for some reason. So maybe it is a permission thing after all?

Doing that command gives me errors:

sudo dnf dsync --refresh and then try again.

looks like there is some I/O errors, probably the drive was not properly umounted or removed, try sudo ntfsfix -db /path/to/device ei. /dev/sda and try to mount again.

I did that and tried again, but still get the same errors.

You say to use sda in the command. Should I not use sdd1 since that is what’s used by the “Liam’s Gameplay” drive?

Yes. No. Maybe. It may be complicated. I contemplated making couple of suggestions and examples, but since my username on this OMLx system is “user”, it would result as dangerously misleading material. The other reason is, that the underlying problem is certainly something else; attempted operation should work automatically. Being strictly a Linux user, I have no ntfs material available, so my examples would not be authentic either.

For the interested parties, mounting using simple command might and in fact should cause file ownership differences. When mounting with automatics, the underlying operation is clearly more refined. If you happen to have something automatically mounted, ‘ls -l /media’ should have ‘+’ at last position of access codes. For the interested parties, https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/What-information-is-listed.html and https://docs.kernel.org/next/filesystems/idmappings.html might be worth a glance, if I have understood correctly.

(tl;dr) System should change the ownership automatically. This does not and actually should not happen when mounting manually. Original problem remains unsolved.

yeah sorry for the confiusion, use your device sdd1.

I discovered I was wrong about having full read/write access when accessing the “Liam’s Gameplay” drive by first mounting it manually in the command-line. I actually don’t have access at all; root does.

This is almost the same as what happened yesterday when I was asking for help in these forums with getting permission access to my other hard drive “Linux Storage”. The solution to that was to mass change the ownership of all the files on the drive by using the command sudo chown -R yourusername /media/yourusername/mountpoint

This completely solved my problem with not being able to do things with the data on my “Linux Storage” HDD.

Shouldn’t the same command work on “Liam’s Gameplay” to regain my ownership and permissions of the files on the HDD? Is it safe to execute?

If “Liam’s Gameplay” being owned by root isn’t the thing causing the mounting issues, it’s at least a major problem in itself, since I can’t write or delete any files on the drive unless I give ownership back to myself.

The errors you get are basically saying that you are having trouble connecting to those repos. If you are still unable to mount and access your drive, I think it is related to those ntfs packages I’m asking you to download.

But I can mount and access the drive. I just have to mount it manually using sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdd1. From here, I can see all the files on the drive just fine, but I can’t delete any, create any, or move any. Essentially I can read but not write. If I check the permission of the files, I can see they are owned by root: