Quote Originally Posted by edzillion
As usual I went ahead like a blunderbus and did lots of things I had no idea what I was doing.
Anyway I had a problem accessing the internal drive on my laptop and was getting the same error as the OP:

Unable to mount device
Error org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure

So tried to mount it various ways and then used the command:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/sda1 -o force

which worked fine.

Step 2:

Tried to get the USB hard drive to be recognised so I could copy the data off the drive, so again:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb /media/sdb -o force

which worked. Copied all the information off the internal drive and then put the usb drive into my windows machine (didnt dismount). When added it recognises a usb mass storage device but doesnt appear in my computer. Also I tried remounting it in knoppix but I get the error 'NTFS is either inconsistent, or you have hardware faults......'

any ideas?
What commend would you use before disconnecting the USB Hard drive?
thanks