I have a hdd attached to my server. It’s sda but has 2 partitions so sda1 @16M and sda2 @3.6T It defaulted to being in the location /media/devmon so I kept that and it worked for ages. Suddenly the data is gone. I had files located here: /media/devmon/4tb_drive/kiwix/zim and that directory is now empty. But I put the drive into a Windows box, and everything was there.

When I run mount /dev/sda2 /media/devmon/ it says:

The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
or fast restarting.)
Could not mount read-write, trying read-only

I originally formatted this drive in Windows, is that the issue? Ideally I’d use btrfs or zfs not ntfs, but here we are.

How do I get access again?

  • @mvirts
    2•4 months ago

    If you really need the data on it, get another disk and make an image of the failed drive asap.

    If not, skip that step.

    See if testdisk can detect your partitions and read data from them.

    • @Dust0741OP
      2•4 months ago

      I can see the data on windows, but not on linux

      • @mvirts
        2•4 months ago

        It is NTFS after all, support has been flaky over the years. Are you running modern Linux NTFS drivers? If there’s no other messages and chkdsk repair (on Windows) doesn’t fix it I would assume the filesystem is alright and look at trying different NTFS drivers versions on Linux.

        Have you verified that Windows can actually read all of the files? It may show them and not be able to read some of the files if the filesystem is corrupted.