Ubuntu 24.04 external hard drive won't automount

Support and Help
1

Ubuntu Version:
24.04 LTS

Desktop Environment (if applicable):
GNOME version 46

Problem Description:
Hi! When I plug in my Toshiba external hard drive it won’t automount. When I try to mount it via the side bar I get this error message: “wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error”.

On a different laptop running 18.04 LTS the external drive automounts w/o problems.

I have only installed 24.04. LTS on my new Laptop a few days ago. At first there was no problem automounting the external drive.

The problem occurred after granting several snaps access to the drive using

sudo snap connect firefox:removable-media

but only after system re-boot. At first it seemed to have worked. So, this may be unrelated, and I may have done something else that caused the problem, that I am unaware of.

What I’ve Tried:
After

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda1

I can mount with

sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 mountdir

but it still won’t automount after I plug it in.

I found this discussion suggesting this solution using
echo 'blacklist ntfs3' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/disable-ntfs3.conf
but I am too much of an amateur to know whether this actually fits my problem and too chicken to just try.

Note, that I don’t really know what I am doing. Answers for dummies are helpful :)))

2

Do you have an entry for the device in /etc/fstab? The options can include “auto” if you want an automount. I don’t have any such entry for an ntfs, but my options usually include “noauto” to keep odd partitions out of the way.

3

Thanks for the reply! As I mentioned, I am amateur. How do I get to see /etc/fstab?

4

Welcome to Ubuntu Discourse :slight_smile:

Open a terminal and put in this command:
cat /etc/fstab

Copy the entire output and paste it here in your reply.

To wrap the output in code tags please highlight the text you pasted and then use Ctrl+E on the keyboard to add tags.

Thanks.

5

Thanks!

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv during curtin installation
/dev/disk/by-id/dm-uuid-LVM-8XmCaOQaCISAjct76PB5ex262R2sMhdHVn6afoF3TSXNfiMytF4HFsx7y27NZlAJ / ext4 defaults 0 1
# /boot was on /dev/nvme0n1p2 during curtin installation
/dev/disk/by-uuid/17862093-9260-4494-a205-eb675e7a4308 /boot ext4 defaults 0 1
# /boot/efi was on /dev/nvme0n1p1 during curtin installation
/dev/disk/by-uuid/E2A1-4096 /boot/efi vfat defaults 0 1
/swap.img	none	swap	sw	0	0
1 Like
6

Don’t be a chicken :wink:

The command above will create the file /etc/modprobe.d/disable-ntfs3.conf

if it doesn’t work you can simply delete the file again with:

sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/disable-ntfs3.conf
without doing any harm to your system…

The only thing to actually care for with such things is to make sure you do not make any typos and type in exactly what it says…

1 Like
7

Thanks for the confidence booster :)) That solved it :)))

1 Like
8

Did I get it right that ‘ntfs3’ doesn’t mount drives that are marked as dirty? And if so is there a way to correct this within Ubuntu?

9

I have not much experience with NTFS (havent used Windows in probably 20y, so there wasn’t any need for me to use NTFS) but a general rule of thumb is to fix filesystem issues with the OS these filesystems belong to, so I wouldnt try to fix NTFS on Linux if I had the opportunity to do it on Windows …

4 Likes
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