Halp Right Linux boffins - sort me out

Dory Berkowitz-Bukowski

Clam whisperer
Oct 15, 2004
42,602
7,191
723
Robin Hood Country
Marklar
₥14,113
My hdd is on the blink, I need to copy all my info over and format it as it's being very temperamental. It started not recognising it at first, then other times it will. Then folders containing lots of files (movies) did not show up on linux or would not open but would do on Windows. Windows now works occasionally and everything is splendid, 90% of the time it won't open the folder, it wants me to simply format the disc. Anyway this is the error message on ubuntu:

Unable to mount the volume

Failed to read the last sector (976768001): Invalid argument.
HINTS: Either the volume is a RAID/LSM but it wasn't setup yet, or
it was not setup correctly (e.g. by not using mdadm -- build...,)
or a wrong device is tried to be mounted, or the partition table is
corrupt (partition is smaller than NTFS), or the NTFS boot sector is corrupt (NTFS size is not valid). Failed to mount '/dev/sbd1': Invalid argument. The decide 'dev/sdb1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the hwole disc instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way round?

A quick google comes up with http://groups.google.com/group/aff-discuss/browse_thread/thread/e915600df2f4dc33?hl=en&pli=1 but as with most linux-related things it goes over my head. I usually try and sort things out myself but nobody ever talks in layman's terms about these things so it's hard for me to decipher, being a computer non-nerd.

Can anybody shed any light on this? Fly?
 
I should hope it doesn't! My megahurtz are running my giggahurtz and my laptop battery which is made of cheese runs on giggahurtz.

Nah but for real I'm a newb. People don't get it when I ask them to explain it as if I was a newborn baby, linux people don't seem capable of being so simplistic :(
 
My hdd is a metaphor for the state of the British economy. :(

lol :p

srsly, though, start with chkdsk in winderz but don't have it automatically repair anything yet, you just want to know if you actually have bad sectors on the drive (prolly) or if there's physical damage (mebbe). better disk repair options are available

how big is the data you're trying to save?