External Hard Disk Corrupt file system?

mgfvvc

I've been asked to help with a Lacie external hard disk that isn't readable from the owner's Mac.

I checked the disk on my Windows laptop and a Linux Mint laptop. In Windows the disk was visible in the device manager, but it wouldn't mount the file system, however the Linux Mint system was able to mount the files system with no issues.

The mount command suggests that it was not mounted as NTFS, but as a 'fuseblk' file system, whatever that is.

Going back to Windows and working through the Lacie troubleshooter , in disk management it says:

"you should see the following information:

• NTFS - If NTFS is missing then the file system has become corrupted. "
  

Instead of NTFS, it says "basic data partition".

According to that the file system is corrupt, however the data is still clearly there, as Linux can mount the file system.I am currently copying the data to a spare external drive, which will take several hours. Once it is all backed up I would like to repair the file system, if that is possible. Is there anything that can repair it, or is it best to just reformat it and restore from backup?

As this drive is used for backup, it's concerning that it failed this way. Is a fault with the drive likely? Obviously I should run SMART diagnostics. Is there anything else that might point to the root cause? As NTFS is a journalled file system, I would not expect issues just from unplugging it at the wrong time.

CoastingHatbox

I'm guessing the disk doesn't have an NTFS file system. And I wouldn't expect it to, unless it was first formatted in a Windows computer.

fuseblk is interesting. FUSE is 'file systems in user space' so I suspect the file system is getting mounted using a library that runs in userspace and FUSE is bridging the gap so to speak.

You need to ignore whatever the Windows Lacie Troubleshooter is telling you and check/fix this using macOS/APFS.

Neil_Jones

IIRC Macs cannot write to NTFS formatted drives.  It can read them, but not do anything more than that.

Most USB external devices that have filesystem corruption issues, these are almost always caused by unplugging it before stopping it (or whatever the equivalent is in MacOS).  If you can't stop the drive for whatever reason, powering the computer off will do the same job.  Being an NTFS formatter drive doesn't affect this - in Windows there are two options for what to do with USB devices - one where you need to "stop" it before unplugging, and the other where you don't.  The former is the default, as its faster, but the latter is more data safe.  I presume there are similar options in MacOS.

[Deleted User]

mgfvvc said:

The mount command suggests that it was not mounted as NTFS, but as a 'fuseblk' file system, whatever that is.

NTFS, exFAT and HFS will show up as fuseblk in Linux when mounted as non-root user so it could be either of those.

I'm assuming this drive has previously worked ok in the Mac and been writeable therefore it must be either HFS or exFAT format because a Mac can only read NTFS, it can't write.

mgfvvc said:

As this drive is used for backup, it's concerning that it failed this way. Is a fault with the drive likely? Obviously I should run SMART diagnostics. Is there anything else that might point to the root cause? As NTFS is a journalled file system, I would not expect issues just from unplugging it at the wrong time.

Backup drives are just as prone to failure as primary drives and should be expected, if you follow the 3-2-1 backup principles for precious data then there is no stress involved when any of the 3 copies fails.

External hard disks in the portable format can be more prone to problems due to unexpected disconnections and general handling of portable drives so it can happen more often.

See if you can read the SMART data with something like CrystalInfo but that doesn't always tell the whole story, I had a 9 year old spinning disk with 15,000 hours use that recently ground to a near halt with very low read speeds but SMART was reporting health as "Good" across all metrics.

Personally I wouldn't trust the LaCie drive now, storage is so cheap compared to the stress and financial impacts from data loss, I'd be looking at buying a brand new drive and getting a third offsite backup (cloud or different house) in place for the future. Or maybe use the LaCie as the third backup but nuke it and do a full disk verification before using again.

Investing in a NAS like QNAP/Synology is worth looking at, they can be set up as RAID to provide redundancy, can be accessed more easily by everyone in the house and can be set up to automatically backup to remote servers such as cloud services for extra peace of mind.

And finally remember to store file version history backup. A backup could be useless in the event of a ransomware infection that encrypts files - it could also encrypt all the files on connected external storage or the next backup could re-write all the clean backup with encrypted files.

debitcardmayhem

on your kinux mc type sudo lsblk -no name,fstype 
It should tell you what the fs type is

mgfvvc

lsblk suggests that it is an NTFS file system on there. The data on it was backed from the Mac, so it was able to write to the NTFS file system somehow.

The fact that it was the sole backup is a significant concern and it's why I'm backing up the data in several locations before I do anything else. Once I've done that I can sort out a more robust long term plan for backup.

debitcardmayhem

ExFat may be an answer, but if it's only for  reading/writing on a MAC then HFS+ is better.