Windows – Best practice for mounting a Windows partition

There are several ways to determine a drives filesystem type. Here's a list of the tools I'm familiar with.

1. blkid

Works whether device is mounted or not.

$ blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="XXXX" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda2: UUID="XXXX" TYPE="LVM2_member"

2. mount

This is only useful once the block device has been mounted.

$ sudo mount | grep /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext4 (rw,relatime,seclabel,data=ordered)

3. lsblk

Shows drive topologies, but not the filesystem types on the devices.

$ sudo lsblk -a
NAME                      MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda                         8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─sda1                      8:1    0   500M  0 part /boot
└─sda2                      8:2    0 465.3G  0 part 

tune2fs

$ tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 | grep magic
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53

Shows the magic number associated with the device, you can look these up on this site, Linux Magic Numbers. It's also in a file, often here, /usr/share/magic. You can locate it using locate /magic.

dumpe2fs

$ sudo dumpe2fs /dev/sda1 | grep magic
dumpe2fs 1.42.7 (21-Jan-2013)
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53

Same things apply as in tune2fs.

/dev/mounts

This is the "file" maintained by the kernel that's used to display devices that have been mounted. NOTE: many of the tools on this list are typically using the contents of this file.

$ sudo cat /proc/mounts | grep /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1 /boot ext4 rw,seclabel,relatime,data=ordered 0 0

file

You can also use the file command to display info about unmounted filesystems.

$ sudo file -s /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=XXXX (needs journal recovery) (extents) (huge files)

An alternative syntax (as root):

$ file - </dev/sda1
/dev/stdin: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=XXXX (needs journal recovery) (extents) (huge files)

Your mounting issue

I'd suspect that the filesystem you're attempting to mount is not what you think it is. Either the entire device was formatted with a filesystem (/dev/sda), in which case you'd be mounting the entire drive. You can test this hypothesis like this:

$ sudo mount /dev/sda /mnt

Of if you need to explicitly tell what filesystem to use:

$ sudo mount -o ext2 /dev/sda /mnt

NOTE: This is generally not the case that an entire filesystem is laid down on the entire device, /dev/sda, rather they're partitioned into /dev/sda1, etc.

Or perhaps the drive has been partitioned. In this case you'd see these partitions with the above command lsblk, where they'd show up as /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc. If that's the case for you then you'll need to mount the partition instead like so:

$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Again pay special attention to the formatting used on the filesystem of the device, you'll occasionally have to specify it literally to mount.

Since your output from fdisk shows that you have /dev/sda1 I'd be inclined to think that you have your filesystem on the 1st partition.

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1              63  1953520064   976760001   83  Linux

So mounting it like this should do the trick:

$ sudo mount -o ext2 /dev/sda1 /mnt

/etc/fstab

If the above mounting commands work then you can add this to your /etc/fstab file.

/dev/sda1 /media/HDD ext2 defaults 0 2

Not sure it's related: I remember AD users have an option to specify "Main group" in user membership "if you have mac clients or posix apps"