Hello, new Linux user here and I cannot mount a new (empty) WD MyBook Essentials 3TB USB external hard drive (Model WDBACW0030HBK-NESN).
I'm only about 3 weeks into this linux thing and so please forgive me if any of my syntax is off
My linux OS is CentOS 5.4 x86-64 running on a dedicated HP z400. The WD MyBook is to back up the large data files we are creating on the HP400 (it's used to run a DNA sequencer)
I plugged the brand new MyBook into my XP system and cleaned out all the pre-installed WD files as soon as I got it, then plugged into my Linux system (2 completely separate machines). It failed to auto-mount with this error:
Failed to read last sector (732558079): Invalid argument HINTS: Either the volume is a RAID/LDM but it wasn't setup yet, or it was not setup correctly (e.g. by not using mdadm --build ...), or a wrong device is tried to be mounted, or the partition table is corrupt (partition is smaller than NTFS), or the NTFS boot sector is corrupt (NTFS size is not valid). Failed to mount '/dev/sdc1': Invalid argument The device '/dev/sdc1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?
I've been searching in many forums and such but so far nothing I've tried has worked, including:
Reformatting the HD (on the XP machine), NTFS format using 4096 byte allocation size (slow format, took hours)
Reformatting the HD (on the XP machine), NTFS format using 512 byte allocation size (that the size used on the two ext3 internal drives; used "quick format" option this time)
Adding a new directory:
# mkdir /media/MyBook
Then changing fstab to add line:
/dev/sdc1 /media/MyBook ntfs-3g rw,umask=0000,defaults 0 0
Then:
# mount /media/MyBook
Which returned the same error each time
I installed gparted, then opened the GUI program. It nicely displays the info on the two installed ext3 hard drives but that's all it shows
Here's some info on other packages which were investigated, installed or updated in an attempt to mount this USB drive:
ntfs-3g would not install, yum reported conflicts with fuse-ntfs-3g
dkms-fuse is not installed
dkms not installed
fuse-ntfs-3g (updated to latest version)
parted (updated to latest version)
When I run
# parted /dev/sdc
Or
# parted /dev/sdc1
I get this message:
Warning: Device /dev/sdc has a logical sector size of 4096. Not all parts of GNU Parted support this at the moment, and the working code is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL.
When I use "print" command in gparted I get
Error: unable to open /dev/sdc (or /dev/sdc1) - unrecognized disk label
I also tried fdisk
# fdisk /dev/sdc
And received this message:
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 45599. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other Oss (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
WARNING: The size of this disk is 3 TB
DOS partition table format can not be used on drives for volumes larger than (2199023255040 bytes) for 512-byte sectors. Use parted(1) and GUID
partition table format (GPT).
Similar results when I used
# fdisk /dev/sdc1
Except some number were different (ie number of cylinders report as 12180)
What am I doing wrong? Is all this problem simply due to the size of the hard drive (3TB)? I also have a 1TB Seagate used to backup several other computers (all XP or Win7). Would I be better to use the Seagate on the linux and the WD on the windows systems?
Thanks
Jason Miller
J.Miller@ec.gc.ca mailto:J.Miller@ec.gc.ca
Aquatic Contaminants Research Division
National Water Research Institute Environment Canada - Canada Centre for Inland Waters 867 Lakeshore Rd. Burlington, Ontario, Canada L7R 4A6
905-336-4537