'Unable to mount Filesystem' Error

Posted by Charles on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Charles
Published on 2012-03-17T23:58:43Z Indexed on 2012/12/15 5:23 UTC
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Trying to extract data from a 'bricked' Western Digital MyBook Live 2tb drive.

I came across a forum that advised to use Ubuntu (booted from a CD) on my Macbook. Managed to download and create a boot CD for Ubuntu (like this little operating system btw). Booted the machine with the CD and plugged the drive (which I had extracted from it's casing and placed into a external USB SATA case & plugged to the laptop). The drive is seen by Ubuntu but each time I click on the drive, it gives me the following error:

Unable to mount 2.0 TB Filesystem

Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb4, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog -try dmesg | tail or so

I am new to this and spent quite some time searching this site to see if I could find a solution to this problem without troubling anyone. I came up with a few that came close but some of the questioners mentioned that they had lost data...which scared me from going further. I need to basically extract 1 particular folder from the drive. If I can get to mount this volume 'sdb4', there is a folder called 'My_Work' which I need to back up. The rest I have/had a copy of.

When I typed in dmesg | tail...I got several lines..but I think ones that are relevant are:

[  406.864677] EXT4-fs (sdb4): bad block size 65536
[  429.098776] hfs: write access to a journaled filesystem is not supported, use the force option at your own risk, mounting read-only
[  439.786365] hfs: write access to a journaled filesystem is not supported, use the force option at your own risk, mounting read-only
[  445.982692] EXT4-fs (sdb4): bad block size 65536
[ 1565.841690] EXT4-fs (sdb4): bad block size 65536

I read somewhere to try/check 'sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb4'. It gave me the following result:

Disk /dev/sdb44: 1995.8 GB, 1995774623744 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 242639 cylinders, total 3897997312 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/sdb4 doesn't contain a valid partition table

This is where I reached and got frustrated and decided to try & get help on this without digging myself deeper into a hole! I understand that the answer may already be out there. If so, could someone please point me in the right direction. And if not, could someone please resolve (if possible) my situation!

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