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Mounting external USB hard disk fails on Ubuntu Mate 20.04 LTS

ca flag

I have a USB hard disk drive attached to my computer. This disk has two Linux partitions on it (both formatted as ext3). When I open "Computer" at my desktop, under "devices" it shows both partitions as available. (Their labels are sbp_ext3_0 and sbp_ext3_1.) When I click the first partition to open it I get the error message:

"Error mounting /dev/sdc1 at /media/xx/sbp_ext3_0: wrong fstype, badoption, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1, missing code page or helper program, or other error".

I also tried to mount it manually by "sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sbp_ext3_0", and that too failed in the same fashion.

I have been using this disk drive for years on other Linux platforms (such as RH and Fedora both). There is a lot of useful data on it. Is there a way to mount an external USB hard disk on Ubuntu Mate?

David avatar
cn flag
Your statement I have been using this disk drive for years Should be a clue the drive has most likely failed.
user296662 avatar
ca flag
No, it did not fail. I switched it to my ten year old desktop running RH6.10, and it was mounted instantly and automatically. I can read all the files on it.
PonJar avatar
in flag
Good to know your drive works on another system. Have you any other usb storage devices and if so can you mount those on the Mate system
user296662 avatar
ca flag
I added two additional external USB hard drives, and I connected them as per the suggestion by PonJar. These two drives are not linux drives. One of them is NTFS, and it is successfully mounted of type 'fuseblk'. The other has two partitions: NTFS + FAT32. Both of these are mounted automatically as fuseblk and vfat. It appears that Ubuntu Mate does well with NTFS and FAT32, but it fails with a disk with two ext3 partitions.
PonJar avatar
in flag
It’s not a hardware fault then. I think you may need to specify the filesystem type in your mount command. Try sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sbp_ext3_0
user296662 avatar
ca flag
OK, I tried the explicit mount command with the '-t ext3' option. That failed with the error message: "mount: /mnt/sbp_ext3_0: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error." After that, I added a second disk with two partitions: NTFS + ext3. Ubuntu automatically mounted the NTFS partition, but not the second ext3 partition. Then I tried to mount that explicitly by: "sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdd2 /mnt/linux33", which produced the exact same error message (other than the mount point) I mentioned above in this update.
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