[CentOS] Cannot mount 3TB MyBook USB HD

Gerry Reno

greno at verizon.net
Fri Mar 8 22:01:32 UTC 2013


On 03/08/2013 04:32 PM, Miller,Jason [Burlington] wrote:
> 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 at ec.gc.ca <mailto:J.Miller at 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
>
>  
>


Did you try mounting this drive as type dos or fat or vfat?

It looks like it might be old dos format.  Not NTFS.





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