Problem with mounting a partition

Question

I typed fdisk -l and here is the part of it's output related to this question of mine

.
.
/dev/sda5     2989   5600   20971520 7  HPFS/NTFS 
/dev/sda6     5600   8211   20971520 7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7     8211   10822  20971520 7  HPFS/NTFS 
. 
.

Now, when i mounted /dev/sda6 as

ntfs-3g /dev/sda6 /home/Partition

following error poped up

ntfs-3g: Failed to access volume '/dev/sda6': No such file or a directory

Then the ouput of ntfs-3g --help is printed telling me how to use ntfs-3g.

I also tried ntfs */dev/sda6* but it gave a similar error, saying

Failed to determine whether /dev/sda6 is mounted; No such file or directory
Mounting volume.... Error opening partition device: No such file or directory
Failed to startup volume: No such file or directory
FAILED
Attempting to correct errors...Error opening partition device: No such file or directory
FAILED
Failed to startup volume: No such file or directory
Volume is corrupt. You should run chkdsk

And I don't have chkdsk command available on Finnix, the distributin I am using right now.

Any ideas to get around this problem?

Answer 1

The errors you see generally mean that the NTFS-3g driver detects some errors or corruption on the filesystem. The NTFS-3g driver is playing it safe by refusing to mount the partition.

When it says you should run chkdsk, it means you should boot into Windows and run chkdsk on the drive from there. Microsoft designed NTFS, and their tools are much safer for risky operations like correcting these kinds of corruption.

You can try running ntfsfix if you have the ntfsprogs package installed. It fixes some common NTFS problems, but it is not a replacement for chkdsk. From the ntfsfix(8) manpage:

ntfsfix is NOT a Linux version of chkdsk. It only repairs some fundamental NTFS inconsistencies, resets the NTFS journal file and schedules an NTFS consistency check for the first boot into Windows.

If you absolutely must mount it now, you can use the -o force mount option. This causes NTFS-3g to clear the unclean NTFS logfile. Use with caution. Running chkdsk on the filesystem from within Windows is a much safer alternative.