Hi! I have slackware 11.0,and I can't mount any of my ntfs drives.The error I have is:
Failed to read last sector (115346699): Invalid argument
Perhaps the volume is a RAID/LDM but it wasn't setup yet, or the
wrong device was used, or the partition table is incorrect.
Failed to startup volume: Invalid argument
Failed to mount '/dev/sda3': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sda3' doesn't have a valid NTFS.
Maybe you selected the wrong device? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/hda, not /dev/hda1)? Or the other way around?

What is strange,all my volumes works fine in widnows,and with standard linux ntfs(read-only).Any solutions?

Please send the outputs of

fdisk -lu
dmraid -ay
dmraid -s

The kernel driver doesn't check full NTFS volume availability that's why it doesn't catch your problem. But this could be fatal for a full read-write driver as ntfs-3g.

for fdisk -lu



for dmraid -ay & dmraid -s

Your partition table is corrupt. It says you have 115346696 sectors in
/dev/sdb3 but the NTFS boot sector says you have 115346699. The two must be
equal or even in the worst case the later must be smaller. You can probably
confirm this if you run 'ntfsresize --info --force /dev/sdb3' (this is a
read-only fsck).

What partition manager did you use to setup your problematic NTFS partition
and what software did you use to create the filesystem on it?

Szaka

It doesn't help,it gives:


And I still can't mount it with ntfs-3g(same error).Partitions were created using Windows XP.Is there any way to repair that partition table?

The ntfsresize output shows that NTFS is indeed bigger than the partition
which confirms that your partitioning is corrupt (you have found a bug in
ntfsresize).

What does Windows think, how big is the relevant partition in __bytes__?

Hold on,now the windows can't even read that partitions(what's strange they were working yesterday).It says that the drive is unformated,and if I want to format it.The disk menager says it is round 55.00gb.And they can be read using standard linux ntfs driver.Very strange.

On Sun, 14 Jan 2007, gambiting wrote:


That's the expected. I was very surprised Windows accepted it.


You had to use some partitioner which corrupted your partition table or the
NTFS boot sector. Either explicitly or implicitely (something invoked it).


Something made your partition at least 2 kB smaller than it was previously
but not the filesystem. That's why you have this problem.

You must make the relevant partition a bit bigger and things will be fine.

Hi, I've come found this thread using search. I've a 500GB SATA hard drive which Windows XP happily partitioned with a single primary partition and then formatted as NTFS. When accessing this disc with Ubuntu 8.04 I find that the partition has been created by Windows XP to be larger than the device.

Sure enough,

it looks to have made the partition one cylinder too long past the end of the disk.

However, sudo mount /dev/sdc works just fine, as does

If I alter the partition table to have the partition correctly end at the end of the disc, I get an error on trying to mount or from ntfs-3g.probe -r /dev/sdc1 pointing out it Failed to read last sector, understandably.

I think the solution is to resize the NTFS to be within the bounds of the disc, and then shrink the partition to end at the end of the disc. However, I think ntfs-3g folks should be aware that filesystems like this come along. I asked TestDisk's author, Christophe Grenier, about this and he said

Christophe sees an awful lot of Windows discs with his TestDisk work so I wonder if it would be a good idea for ntfs-3g to also become aware that this situation can occur.

Cheers, Ralph Corderoy.

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for the info but thankfully no need to worry.

NTFS-3G doesn't need and use the partition size in any way. No matter if the partition size is outside of the disk, if the file system size is inside of the accessible media (what NTFS-3G does test) then NTFS will work fine and no need to fear something can get lost or corrupted.

The relevant NTFS-3G check is for file system, not partition accessibility. By this explicit test, it catches these errors during a mount attempt:

1. RAID/LDM wasn't setup.
2. Corrupt partition table (corrupt file system).
3. Corrupt NTFS boot sector.

I know Christophe and helped him in the past how to fix corrupt partition tables (quite many partitioning tools do it unfortunately but these problems were typically submitted to us because people thought it was NTFS corruption instead of partition table corrupts).

NTFS-3G is used probably on some millions of computers. If there were something horrible wrong then people would start to report it. So, as long as Windows creates the file system correctly, no need to worry. If it starts creating corrupt NTFS then NTFS-3G will immediately catch the problem and we will notify Microsoft.

Regards, Szaka

Hi szaka, thanks for your detailed reply. I agree with what you say and wasn't very clear in what I thought could be done. A ex-Windows user putting his hard drive on a Linux machine finds that (a) his partition extends beyond the disc and (b) if he fixes this then ntfs-3g reasonably points out that it `Failed to read last sector' which it doesn't before the partition is resized. Neither of these things showed up under Windows so he may wrongly think Linux is to blame.

I'm guess (b) only happens after the partition is shrunk because ntfs-3g doesn't try to read() the last sector when the partition is bigger than the disc, but just tries to lseek() to that position. Since it isn't an error to seek past the end of the disc as long as you stay inside the partition, lseek() works, but it is an error to seek past the end of the partition, so once the user has made the partition end within the disk, lseek then fails. I think ntfs-3g should do both the lseek() and a read(), if the former works and the latter fails then it suggests the partition ends beyond the disc and the user could be warned.

Anyway, this is all a bit puzzling for the Windows user and perhaps the ntfs-3g FAQ can have an entry explaining that WinXP does erroneously create a partition bigger than the drive, it isn't Linux getting it wrong, and the fix is to first shrink the filesystem so it fits in the disc space, and then shrink the partition.

With that FAQ in place, there may be more help for those that Google in the future.

Cheers, Ralph.

I'm having the same trouble trying to mount a partition bigger than the drive. Is there a way to force ntfs-3g to ignore this error? Up until a few days ago I was using a much older version of ntfs-3g(over a year) and it must have ignored it. I have it mounted with the read-only ntfs driver for now.

here the output of fdisk -lu

Disk /dev/hdb: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders, total 390721968 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc5fd5877

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 63 268430084 134215011 42 SFS


I'm not sure why it shows SFS as the filesystem but it definitely is NTFS and it works perfectly in windows.


Thanks for all of the hard work that made ntfs-3g possible!

SFS is not a basic NTFS but a dynamic NTFS volume which usually consist of several devices/partitions. You have the error because the end of your NTFS volume is missing, i.e. severely corrupted. The check is exactly there to detect and warn about these problems.

You need to setup your volume properly using the kernel LDM driver, mdadm, etc. This is totally unrelated to NTFS-3G.

Thanks

I'm having the same problem but I don't know how to fix it. I used Ubuntu 9.04 to install and it apparently screwed up somewhere. Here is my partition table.

I'm very newbish with these types of things. How can I fix this? I was just going to start using linux today too...

If Ubuntu made your NTFS partition smaller than the NTFS file system then you definitely must report it to them because you may lost data.

The fix is either remove Linux and increase the Windows partition, or reinstall Windows, or save the partition table then create one large NTFS partition, resize the NTFS file system to be smaller then restore the original partition table (VERY DANGEROUS, HAVE BACKUP!).

Regards, Szaka

Hi, I have a similar problem to the ones mentioned, and can't figure out how to fix it. Here is a quick backstory, skip it if you want.


With the backstory out the way, here is some output:









(that is the 2009.2.1 ebuild, but I also tried 2009.3.8)

Using the kernel driver (mount -t ntfs /dev/sdd1/ /mnt/vista/) I can mount the drive in read only. With ntfsprogs (ntfsmount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/vista/) I can mount in rw.
Using vista's drive manager, or diskpart.exe (both run as adminstrator) I am unable to shrink the drive.

Any thoughts? Just in case you didn't read (or I said it badly): the vista drive *was* mountable with ntfs3g around a week ago and I have made *no* changes to it.

This is your problem: "the partition table is corrupt (partition is smaller than NTFS)". More details: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#mbr

If you make the partition entry bigger then the driver will mount NTFS.

Others mount it because they don't check for this type of inconsistency.

How can I safely make the change? I'm not having any luck with parted. The link doesn't help much. Also, it seems the error is the partition is too big, but you say its too small?
Sorry for my confusion..

Parted is indeed infamous corrupting file systems this way in the last 6-7 years. The link doesn't explain how to fix the problem because your problem is not related in any way to NTFS. It's a partition table corruption, so you need to look for solution using a recovery or a partitioning software.

The partition (device) size is 500105731584 bytes which is smaller than the 500105736704 bytes NTFS volume size. This is your problem. The partition must be always at least as big as the file systems otherwise your file system is truncated and your data and file system metadata is lost which may mean even more non-accessible data on the partition.

When you started recently one of your partitioner software, it trashed the partition table and consequently the end of your NTFS file system.

Hi, I've a 3 TB USB external HDD. Everything was fine until last September 2012 and I unplugged the HDD without any problem. But today, I try to mount it with no luck. Then I come to this thread using google search.
I use ubuntu 12.04 (Precise). And on windows, it doesn't recognized.
I need some advice, please... Thanks.

Here are some information you may need :

Hi,


With a 4K-sector disk, you must use ntfs-3g version at least 2012.1.15. Please post the output of :


Hope this was unsuccessful ! You are using a very old ntfsresize which cannot deal with 4K sectors properly and might damage the partition.

Please show the file system parameters, using a recent ntfsinfo and a recent ntfsfix :

Regards

Jean-Pierre

Thanks...
There should be an additional information on my first post. All the code on my first post was produce on my ubuntu 8.04.04 LTS (Hardy), and I also try to mount on another machine with ubuntu 12.04.01 (Precise), but the result was the same as Hardy.

A couple hours laters, I also did try to mount on another machine with ubuntu 10.04.03 LTS (Lucid) OS, and it was auto-mounted successfully !
Here is the info you might need on my Lucid machine :





Well, I'm happy now, at least on Lucid it work fine.
But still wonder why on Hardy and Precise (and also windows) did'nt work ???

Then I replug to Hardy machine to follow your suggestions, here are the result :

Hi,


The OS versions are meaningless to me, what I need to know it the ntfs-3g version.

Hmm. You are probably using an archaic version.

This is definitely an archaic version.


I suspect you have formatted your 4K sectored disk with an old version of ntfs-3g, designed before any 4K sectored disk existed. The designer could not guess how Microsoft would format such disks, and he guessed wrong. Only since 2012.1.15 ntfs-3g uses the same format as Microsoft for 4K sectored disks, not compatible with the design of older ntfs-3g.

If you formatted with an old mkntfs, you have either to keep using old ntfs-3g or reformat your partition. AFAIK chkdsk on Windows repairs such partitions by deleting all files.

Regards

Jean-Pierre