mjhjmtu

I have a hard drive with a lot of back up files, that were created by PhotoRec. When mounting it with a windows computer I can read all the files perfectly fine. Under linux I get an error when trying to look at the folder that contains all my backups. The rest of the hard drive is perfectly readable but when I try to ls the backup folder I get

ls: reading directory .: Input/output error

In Dolphin I just see a blank directory. I have tried letting arch auto mount and I have tried manually mounting it with -t ntfs-3g option (only flag used). A strange thing I notice is that if I manually mount it with the 3g option then all permissions are -rwxrwxrwx but if I let it be automatically mounted I have permissions -rw------- 1 steven steven (some have 2, but not many. The directories show d as they should). These are the same for every file and directory on the system.

I don't understand why I can't see these files under Linux, but can under Windows. I even booted up SystemRescueCD again to see if it recognized it, but it couldn't even see the files (even though it was what had originally written the files in the first place). What is so weird to me is that I can read everything on the hard drive except that one folder. It has the exact same permissions as everything else in the hard drive.

Additional info:

This is a fresh install of Arch. As of today.

[steven@serenity ~]$ uname -a
Linux serenity 3.16.1-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Aug 14 07:40:19 CEST 2014 x86_64 GNU/Linux

(auto mounted)

[steven@serenity ~]$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sdb: 596.2 GiB, 640135028736 bytes, 1250263728 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
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x1549f232

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 * 63 1250258159 1250258097 596.2G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

The errors indicate a hardware problem with the disk but only on sectors containing the data.

The reason that under Windows you don't see these errors (until now), is probably caused by the difference in file browsing software: most Linux file browsers read more of the file information, from the file when opening a folder, than Windows Explorer does. This is to try and make previews, and have meta-data for the files available. Windows is probably only retrieving this when explicitly asked for.

You can try and see if you can copy all of the files under Windows to a separate disc. If that works run some thorough disk analyser on the original disk before continuing to use it (after making a full backup).