External drive does not mount after Ubuntu upgrade

Support and Help
1

Apologies in advance if I’m not formatting my question properly. I know next to nothing and this is overwhelming to me.

I have Ubuntu Mate 24.04 (upgraded today from 22.04 which I’ve been using for about a year). During upgrade there was an issue with ibus. At the end of the process it said the upgrade was done with errors. Now my external drive does not mount. Error message says “… wrong type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error”

I checked the connections, tried a different USB port, restarted the computer but the problem persisted.

Based on what I read elsewhere I tried: ‘sudo apt install --reinstall ntfs-3g’
I got the following:

You might want to run 'apt --fix-broken install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 ibus : Depends: ibus-data (= 1.5.26-4) but 1.5.29-2 is to be installed
        Depends: gir1.2-ibus-1.0 (= 1.5.26-4) but 1.5.29-2 is to be installed
        Depends: python3-ibus-1.0 (= 1.5.26-4) but 1.5.29-2 is to be installed
 libatk1.0-0t64 : Breaks: libatk1.0-0 (< 2.52.0-1build1)
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt --fix-broken install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

I tried ‘apt --fix-broken install’ and got this:

E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?

Then I tried ‘sudo apt install ibus’ and got this:

You might want to run 'apt --fix-broken install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libatk1.0-0t64 : Breaks: libatk1.0-0 (< 2.52.0-1build1)
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt --fix-broken install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

I see there is a post from December 2024 that seems somewhat related but I don’t know enough to try to tweak it to my issue.

Thank you in advance for your help!

2

You should use sudo with this command

3

Thank you!
I run ‘sudo apt --fix-broken install’
No error messages but disk is still not mounting.

Then I run ‘sudo apt install --reinstall ntfs-3g’
Again, no error messages, but the disk is still not mounting after rebooting the computer a couple times. Disk utility is able to see the disk and thus I confirmed it is formatted as NTSF.

4

This is how to resolve this: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=433013

5

Why are you using an ntfs filesystem on the drive if your OS is Ubuntu? Do you have a windows install on that computer or another computer you share the drive with? How are you trying to mount the drive/partition?

7

I’ve been using the same external drive (a Toshiba) for a few years, starting when I first installed Ubuntu and had dual boot with Windows. Last year I installed a new hard drive and installed Ubuntu Mate as the sole OS and kept using the same external drive to store all my files. I did not have a problem using the drive until yesterday when I upgraded the OS.

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8

Thanks. I’ll try and see what happens.

9

Thank you! This worked:

echo 'blacklist ntfs3' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/disable-ntfs3.conf
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