0

I had an external hard drive which has always worked for years. All of a sudden one day I opened my libre office which multiple files that were open after a crash and libre can't recover them because it can't see my external drives.

I have looked extensively into how to get programs to see external drives and nothing has worked.

The kicker is my bookmarked folders that are on my external drives also stopped being accessible if I click on the bookmark in nautilus. So if I click on my book mark it says 'you do not have permission necessary to view the contents of xyz folder'. But if I click on the external hard drive itself and then navigate down to said bookmarked subdirectory it shows just fine.

Can someone please help me to figure out why my programs can't see my external hard drives anymore after years of working. I had important documents that crashed unsaved that won't recover due to this as well as all my other programs can't save to my external drive anymore so I have to save them to documents which is a nightmare for organization when your work and job is involved in this process.

Thank you!

sunshineawake
  • 3

1 Answers1

0

Chances are what's happened is at the point when /dev/sdb1 was trying to mount at the usual location /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT the folder /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT already existed, so to prevent overmounting and hiding what's in that folder, the system mounted /dev/sdb1 under /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT1. This is normal, to protect the contents of /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT

In some instances, if you reboot, all will be fine, and you'll end up back where you started with /dev/sdb1 mounted under /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT.

However, in the meantime you (or a program) may have inadvertently added files to /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT while the disk is mounted under /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT1.

So the /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT will always continue to exist, and you'll persist with the disk mounting under /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT1.

However, if you check /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT and make sure it truly is empty with a simple ls -ltahr /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT then you can confidently remove the folder, reboot, and chances are it will all be back as it was.

If, however, there is data in /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT then you probably want to move/copy/delete it as appropriate, and the folder /media/idm/STORAGE-EXT then reboot.

popey
  • 24,549