hi guys
i plugged in my EX HDD to copy something off it. when i went back to use it again i got the error …error mounting… what went wrong…
any ideas
Hi Chaza,
Could be one of many issues, it really depends on exactly what you did. For example, did you remove the external drive before you ran “umount” on it? If so, then assuming you didn’t reboot, when you plug it in again, it will think it’s already mounted and used the (now dead) mount point it had when you first plugged it in. Fix; you could try thing like “umount -f” on the old mount point, the ultimate fix would be a reboot.
Alternatively, did you do something to the device that may have corrupted it? Just as a completely random example, if you plug the device into another system that doesn’t support the filesystem you have on the device, some systems will prompt for “this device is unformatted, would you like to format it?”.
what i did was just plug it in, take the copy of something, then pull the hdd out again.
the error message say something about a missing code page.
Ok, so when you plug a drive in, it will (typically) auto-mount it. When you pull it, whereas it might try to auto-unmount it, it may fail. Typically for example if you open a graphical file browser on the device, or maybe a terminal session and “cd” to a folder on the device, the auto-unmount might fail. (all depends on your system and how it’s set up)
Try;
df -h
or for an alternative more detailed less friendly display;
cat /proc/mounts
And see if your device is still showing as mounted. If it didn’t unmount when you pulled it, I would expect an error when you plug it in again. Try a manual unmount on the device name;
umount -f /dev/(your device name)
df -h gives me some data
cat/proc/mounts
gives me more data
my device doesnt seem to be there
Yes, “df” will filter out a lot of stuff it assumes you won’t be interested in …
thats asks for the device name its jusr a seagate.
what would the device name look like
Ok,
- Determine the name of your device. If you can’t see what it should be, plug the device in and then as do;
sudo dmesg
This will show you lines from the system log and you should be able to see from that what you just plugged in. An example from my machine;
1302855.508010] usb-storage 5-1.4:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[1302855.508277] scsi host1: usb-storage 5-1.4:1.0
[1302856.559306] scsi 1:0:0:0: Direct-Access SanDisk Ultra 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[1302856.559672] sd 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[1302856.564269] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] 60063744 512-byte logical blocks: (30.8 GB/28.6 GiB)
[1302856.565723] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[1302856.565733] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
[1302856.566259] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[1302856.606146] sdb: sdb1 sdb2
[1302856.606677] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
This tells me that I plugged in a device labelled as “sdb” which has two partitions referenced as “sdb1” and “sdb2”. If you then take a look at “df”, you are looking for a filesystem mounted on one of these name. i.e. /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2.
- Once you have identified what is mounted on this device, use the “umount” command to unmount it. In this example you can use “umount -f /dev/sdb1” or if “df” shows that “/dev/sdb1” is mounted on “/tmp”, you could use “umount -f /tmp”. If you use the wrong device name, the device name from my example or “(your device name)” it’s not going to have any beneficial effect. “umount” should not ask you anything, it should work or give an error …
i got this
1457.018140] scsi 3:0:0:1: Wrong diagnostic page; asked for 1 got 8
[ 1457.018166] scsi 3:0:0:1: Failed to get diagnostic page 0x1
[ 1457.018177] scsi 3:0:0:1: Failed to bind enclosure -19
[ 1457.0
i dont understand what the data is saying
ive tried it with another hdd, they both wont work
Ok, so that particular error in isolation, would indicate that you are using what I now refer to as “spinning rust”, i.e. a traditional hard disk, without any external power supply, i.e. with power coming via the USB connection.
This is usually the result of the system trying to mount the disk before the disk is “ready”. The difference between new solid state disks, USB keys etc, is that there are no moving parts, you apply the power and the device is ready. With “hard disks”, there is literally a spinnining disk inside and you can’t use the device until the disk has “spun up” to operational speed and reports “ready”. So typically you would need to tell your system to wait for the disk to spin up before trying to mount it, or, let the auto-mount fail, then mount if “manually”.
In your dmesg log, I would have expected it to print out the device information once the device had spun up, was the “failed to bind” really the last thing it printed?
Edit: another thought / extension, is this a really large drive? sometimes large drives need more power than USB is expecting … which cause either extend the spin-up time or indeed cause it to fail.
i dont understand what that means… i get the spinning bit. so how do tell the pc to wait till it spins
Mm, don’t know off-hand, I’ve not used that kind of device since … Hmm … not bought one since around 2012. I only ever use SSD’s now, even the slow ones are 4x faster on throughput and 100+ times faster on latency … not to mention power consumption. (no real reason to use HDD’s any more)
If it “did” mount, the first thing I’d try is a reboot.
(you didn’t say how big the device was?)
If the output of “dmesg” really “only” prints what you’ve listed, then it’s not giving you a device name … so there’s not really anything more you can do. You can’t tell it to wait for the device if you don’t know what the device name is.
Try unplugging it and plugging it in again and see if “dmesg” gives you more info, or reboot, then plug it in and see if “dmesg” is more helpful.
ive tried a reboot… still the same
what has been lost since i plugged it in… at frist i saw the hdd, did what i wanted and now its gone… what has been lost…
Ok, so if you plug the device in and all it gives you is the bind error with no
details of the device (something like the example I listed from my machine) then it’s failing to read anything useful from the device - which would indicate a catastrophic hardware failure. (OR a code-18)
If you have multiple devices drives doing the same thing, the most likely suggestion would be a failed USB port, failed USB controller (or failed cable).
Next step would be to plug those drives into “another” computer and see what happens. (the other possibility is both of your drives failed at the same time, which seems unlikely)
IF this was a case of the devices being corrupted in some way, they should still register with “dmesg” when you plug them in, so it doesn’t look like a device corruption issue)
Noe; USB controllers can and do fail, I’ve had at least one instance over the last couple of years…