Help! cant access my added hard disk

General Help
1

my dell inspiron laptop has 2 hard drives 1 ssd 256 gig ( contains zorin)
and a 1 tera hdd ( contains pics and programs)
i removed the 1 tera hdd while installing zorin on my ssd so when i removed windows 10 it doesnt accidentaly remove any files from my hdd

after i was done installing i installed my hdd again but found i cannot access my hard disk files at all and gives me the error that says
error mounting /dev/sdb3 unknow error when mounting /dev/-sdb3

but when i go into disks i find that both disks are read but the hdd is in NFTS format any help???

1 Like
2

Hi, just to clarify some things and get the basics out of the way:

  1. When exactly are you seeing this error message? Is it when you turn on your computer, when you connect the hard drive, when you try to access the files on that drive...?

  2. What is the output of sudo lsblk? You can run this command on a terminal window.

  3. What version of Zorin did you install: Core, Lite?

1 Like
3

When you connect the drive to the pc, open disks and copy the uuid. Then in the terminal you can open the /etc/fstab file by sudo gedit /etc/fstab. You can use your favorite text editor, just replace gedit. In the file, look for your drive entry, if one isn't there, copy the system entry and change the uuid with ntfs-3g immediately after. This will give you full access to the ntfs drive.

You can visit automount - How to mount a NTFS partition in /etc/fstab? - Ask Ubuntu for the complete response, i provide an copy of the pertinent info below.

Permissions for ntfs and vfat file systems must be set with the dmask, fmask and umask options. dmask controls permissions for directories, fmask controls permissions for files, and umask controls both. Since these options set masks, they should be the complement of the permissions you want. For example, rwx for the owner and rx for others is 022 rather than 755.

To set the owner, use the uid and gid options for user and group, respectively. You can find your UID with the command id -u. To find your GID, use id -g. These values are both usually 1000.

A common set of mount options for ntfs is uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=027,fmask=137. This sets you as the owner of the drive, and sets the permissions to drwxr-x---.

Ex:
UUID=EEA2B69CA2B668AB /WIN_C ntfs-3g defaults,nls=utf8,umask=000,dmask=027,fmask=137,uid=1000,gid=1000,windows_names 0 0

The most basic that will give you access follows:
UUID=65AEC0E830EA0497 /WIN_D ntfs-3g rw 0 0

1 Like