Ever had a question about Linux but felt too afraid to ask? Well now’s your chance, ask any question about Linux, no matter how noob or repeated it is, and I and others will help answer them.
Previous noob question thread: https://lemmy.ml/post/14261893
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With the recent Microsoft garbage, I’m giving Linux another try. I’ve been running a laptop for a while, no issues. My main rig, however can’t read all of my um…?hard drives
A live USB of Mint 21 reads 2 of 5 drives fine. The rest are recognized from GParted, but can’t access them. It looks like NTFS-3G is installed.
I’ve duck duck go’d (which apparently is just Bing) for a solution, but haven’t succeeded. Long term, I can probably pick up another drive, copy, and reformat everything to something Linux friendly. For now, I just want access.
I’m lazy and burned out. I don’t want to use the terminal- which I did try. I just want to make a few clicks and have access to all of my files.
If it matters, the drives (roughly) show up as: 500 gb, 4 TB NTFS (readable) 3, 12, 16 TB unknown (not readable)
Windows says they’re all NTFS.
Is there an easy way to easily mount my drives?
If you can boot back into windows, turn off quick startup/shutdown, run chkdsk or whatever on the drives, reboot back into windows then boot back into Linux and you’ll be okay.
Quick startup is a kind of weird sleep/hibernate mutant that leaves drives in an unclean state when it turns off, so the Linux drivers for ntfs say “I’m not gonna touch that possibly damaged drive”.
It was a good theory, but no luck. I’m perplexed on this one.
Can a windows boot usb also not read them? If so and if you have the space to do so, it’s worthwhile to backup, reformat and repopulate the unreadable drives.
I think the disks could be Dynamic Disks on which it would not be a good idea to install a linux distro.
Unfortunately Microsoft’s own advice to change it to a basic disk (since it considers dynamic deprecated) WILL RESULT IN DATA LOSS.
Since you only want to access them it seem to be possible with ldmtool. While it is a cli tool there is a corresponding service that at least according to some askubuntu posts and arcwiki should make them behave like normal filesystems.
Double checked and all of the drives are basic. I’m very confused as to what is different between the disks that readable and the ones that aren’t.
I’ve even tried multiple distros. Same scenario.
That’s a bummer. Unfortunately I can’t think of something else since fast startup has been suggested by another user and it’s also not the case.
The drives are shown as NTFS by Gparted right? Also can you confirm that the sizes should be those sizes? As in do you remember from when you bought them? 16 TB is still a big drive. Additionally can you confirm that they are all different drives and not partitions on the same disk.
Do they show up on the file explorer sidebar or if you go to “Other Locations” (in the file explorer)? If so do you get an error when you try to access them?
If they don’t unfortunately you probably will have to use the terminal to try and mount them so we can hopefully get some error message and hopefully some clue to what is going on.