Weird USB drive behaviour

[SidewaysTuesday]

I installed Kubuntu and everything seemed OK. I plugged in a couple of USB drives I use and that seemed to work. The next day I can't use the drives, they say "wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock". After some reading I ended up checking the mount point in Partition Manager and that was missing. If I manually enter a mount point and create the corresponding folder the drive is accessible until I unplug it again. The BitLocker protected drive is still inaccessible. Both drives work normally in Windows.

This process is normally quite smooth. What's going on? How do I fix it?

[SidewaysTuesday]

More detail:

The BitLocker drive says "An error occurred while accessing '1.8 TiB Encrypted Drive', the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting /dev/dm-0 at /media/computer/1863GB archive: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/bitlk-5b196a6d-9032-4f54-8901-09763e2489da, missing codepage or helper program, or other error" if I plug it into Linux. It works in Windows.

The other drive says "An error occurred while accessing '1.8TBPortable', the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting /dev/sda2 at /media/computer/1.8TBPortable: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda2, missing codepage or helper program, or other error". If I create a folder and add that as the mount point it works for a while. Again, it works in Windows.

[SidewaysTuesday]

Aha!

dmesg said
[ 3295.379846] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[ 3298.771428] ntfs3(sdb2): It is recommened to use chkdsk.
[ 3298.836063] ntfs3(sdb2): volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!

There is no 'chkdsk' so I did

sudo ntfsfix -d /dev/sdb2

and it seems to have improved for the non-BitLocker drive at least.

[SidewaysTuesday]

BitLocker fixed too! Installed 'Disks' and selected the encrypted partition (not the BitLocker partition but the one inside it) and chose Repair Filesystem fro Additional partition options (one of the two buttons just down to the left) and I can see the files again.

Looking back, this was all my own fault really. Make sure you eject USB drives properly. Of course, if I had paid attention in Windows I might have just listened when it said I needed to fix the file system.

There's a lesson here...

(I'd like to thank https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...bad-superblock for pointing me in the right direction.)

Thanks for listening. Perhaps this will be useful for someone else one day.

[claydoh]

No need to install Gnome's Disks if you don't want to. Use existing tools: