I was playing a game, alt-tabbing froze my system so I waited a bit and then rebooted by using the button on the case, since I couldn’t do differently.

It now throws an error when mounting a drive: error mounting /dev/sdb1 at /media/user/local disk 1: unknown error when mounting (udisks-error-quark, 0)

This drive doesn’t have anything I was using on it, since it’s a media storage drive. I booted up Windows on my second drive and it can see and access this one without problems. How to fix?

  • Something Burger 🍔
    1•2 years ago

    What filesystem is on the disk? If it’s NTFS, you’ll need to fix it on Windows (right click, Properties, Tools, Check).

    • さようならOPEnglish
      0•2 years ago

      It worked, thanks a lot! What would be the Linux alternative to do that?

      • Atemu
        1•2 years ago

        There is none. NTFS is a filesystem you should only use if you need Windows compatibility anyways. Eventhough Linux natively supports it these days, it’s still primarily a windows filesystem.

        • さようならOPEnglish
          1•2 years ago

          Oh, I see. So you’re saying that, when I have the chance, I should move to a different filesysten and that would avoid me issues as the one in the OP?

          • Atemu
            1•2 years ago

            If you’re only using this filesystem on Linux anyways, absolutely.

          • @[email protected]
            1•2 years ago

            If otherwise you don’t plan to use windows on that machine anymore (on bare metal, a virtual machine is not relevant here), it would be better to transfer your data to a Linux native file system. Unless you have a solid preference, ext4 is a good choice.

            Basically you just need to copy your files over, but you may need to do it in chunks (and resize the 2 partitions in every round) if you can’t hold the files if the NTFS file system safely while you reformat it.
            Also, if you want to keep attributes like file creation time and last modification time, that’ll require a bit more copy parameters, if you want this let me know and I’ll fill you in on the details.
            What distro do you use by the way?

            • さようならOPEnglish
              0•2 years ago

              I’ll keep it in mind, but since I’m getting new, bigger drives I think I’ll just wait for and format them directly in the better filesystem. I tried formatting an external HDD and I think I could only pick FAT or NTSC (I’ll double check), hopefully on the internal drives it will be different!

              I’m on Pop!

              • @[email protected]English
                0•2 years ago

                If you’re using gnome disks, it hides the more Linuxy file systems behind an ‘Other’ option.

                Personally, for removable drives I prefer to use

                • ext4 for HDDs
                • f2fs for SSDs
                • exfat for Windows compatibility

                If it’s grayed out or you’re getting errors try searching up ‘how to format as [file system] in [Pop OS/Ubuntu/Linux]’, you might need some extra packages.

                • さようならOPEnglish
                  0•2 years ago

                  Yeah, most options were greyed out. I’ll have to visit the wiki of my distro haha thanks for the tips though

                  edit: actually, just checked, EXT4 isn’t greyed out, but it says “internal disk for use with Linux only” and since it’s an external/portable HDD I didn’t pick that option

                  • @[email protected]English
                    1•2 years ago

                    I’m pretty sure there’s no difference between internal and external ext4 (at least how gnome disks handles it), so I think it’s just trying to make sure users don’t freak out when they format it as ext4 and think their data is all gone on Windows.

                    Also when it’s grayed out you usually just have to install the fuse driver and file system tools, IIRC for exfat you install exfat-fuse and exfatprogs.