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user296662 avatar Ubuntu

Ubuntu only sees the first partition on an external (USB) disk drive

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user296662

I connected an external (1TB) hard disk drive to my computer. It is automatically mounted on /media/$USER/Seagate Backup Plus Drive. However this drive has two partitions: an NTFS partition, and an EXT3 partition. Strangely, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS only mounted the NTFS partition on /dev/sdc1, but it did mount the second Linux partition on /dev/sdc2. I tried to mount /dev/sdc2 by explicitly using the mount command, but it failed.

After that, I ran the command fdisk -l, which detected both partitions on /dev/sdc. I copy the relevant part of fdisk output below:

Disk /dev/sdc: 931.53 GiB, 1000204885504 bytes, 1953525167 sectors
Disk model: Backup+ BK      
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x44fe9885

Device     Boot     Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type

/dev/sdc1              63  643451444  643451382 306.8G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sdc2       643451445 1953520064 1310068620 624.7G 83 Linux

On other Linux platforms (such as RH), I have had no difficulty mounting the second partition on /dev/sdc2. In fact they all do it automatically. Is there something specific I need to do in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to mount the second partition?

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guiverc avatar
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guiverc
I find no differences between GNU/Linux systems (be they Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, OpenSuSE & others...) beyond the differences that occur over time (ie. different age software stacks exist in one when compared with another; eg. Debian *testing* can act different to Debian *old-stable* so I'd expect the latest Fedora to act closest to Debian *stable* currently) For help understanding your `mount` command "*failure*", you should have provided both command & message. Me I think the differences between "*distros*" is mostly age of the software *stack* (then maybe packages included by default..)
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mondotofu avatar
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mondotofu
sudo apt install exfat-fuse extfat-utils
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user296662 avatar
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user296662
Good point, I should have included this earlier. First I created the directory /mnt/biglinux, then I issued the command: "sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc2 /mnt/biglinux". It returned with the error message: "mount: /mnt/biglinux: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc2, missing codepage or helper program, or other error."
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ubfan1
On a machine you successfully mount the partition, what type of filesystem does mount identify in the partition? Might not actually be ext3.
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user296662 avatar
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user296662
To test for this possibility I tried to mount /dev/sdc2 without specifying the file type "-t ext3", and let the mount command figure it out, if it can. It failed with the exact same error message as before, shown in the comment previous to this one.
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user296662 avatar
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user296662
To mondotofu: I installed exfat-fuse and exfat-utils as per your suggestion. I am afraid that did not help.
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user296662 avatar
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user296662
I now added a second external USB hard disk. This too has two partitions on it, and both of them are Linux ext3 partitions. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS does not see the newly added disk. When I attempted to mount it manually (even the first partition) it failed with the same message.
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