3 Troubleshooting

If you plug in your NTFS drive, and it doesn't get mounted, but you see an error message saying something like:

Cannot mount volume.

Unable to mount the volume 'BACKUP'.

Volume is scheduled for check. Please boot into Windows TWICE, or use the 'force' mount option. For example type on the command line:

mount -t ntfs-3g/dev/sdb1 /media/BACKUP -o force

Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sdb1 /media/BACKUP ntfs-3g defaults,force 0 0

this means that the NTFS drive wasn't safely removed from your Windows system before.

To fix this, we must boot into our Windows system again and plug in our NTFS drive. In the Windows Explorer, right-click on the drive and select Properties:

Then go to the Extras tab and select to check the drive for errors (it's the first button saying Jetzt prüfen... in this screenshot (I got a German Windows...)):

Select the option to automatically correct filesystem errors (Dateisystemfehler automatisch korrigieren):

The drive is now being checked:

Click on OK afterwards:

Afterwards, you must safely remove the drive by clicking on the green arrow in the task bar. You should always use this option from now on instead of simply unplugging the drive, because if you simply unplug the drive, you'll get the Cannot mount volume error again in Fedora.

A few seconds after you've selected to safely remove the drive, Windows tells you that the drive can now be disconnected:

Afterwards, you can connect the drive to your Fedora system, and it should now be mounted without errors.

4 Links

• ntfs-3g: http://www.ntfs-3g.org
• Fedora: http://fedoraproject.org