Mounting a Windows Hard Drive on Arch Linux

Nov 24, 2017

After following some of the advice on ntfs-3g arch linux entry which described the procedure to mount a windows system:

A lsblk -f call on the filesystem returned:

 sdb                                                         
 ├─sdb1 vfat   SYSTEM   
 ├─sdb2 ntfs   Recovery 
 ├─sdb3                 
 ├─sdb4 ntfs   OS       
 └─sdb5 ntfs   Restore  

I was after sdb4 in this case. So I invoked on the command line:

 $ ntfs-3g /dev/sdb4 /mnt/fat/

Which returned the message:

 Unprivileged user can not mount NTFS block devices using the external FUSE
 library. Either mount the volume as root, or rebuild NTFS-3G with integrated
 FUSE support and make it setuid root. Please see more information at
 http://tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-faq/#unprivileged

So with sudo privileges I invoked it again, but this time around the more precise error message that Input/output error NTFS is inconsistent was returned on the terminal. The entire message was as follows:

 ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
 Failed to read of MFT, mft=391080 count=1 br=-1: Input/output error
 Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
 unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
 or fast restarting.)
 ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
 Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error
 NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
 SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
 then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
 important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
 it

If I were to invoke it with mount instead of ntfs-3g, then it would have mounted it without a setback

 $ sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb4 /mnt/fat

successfully mounted it and I was able to access the files on that hard drive.