i_am_hiding

Hi All,

I have a 4TB drive that was originally in a PC connected via SATA. I now wish to put it in an external enclosure and connect it via USB, however this is proving more difficult than I expected, and from what I understand it's Windows XP's fault.

On attempting to mount the drive with sudo mount /dev/sdc /mnt, I receive the following error:

mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.

The output of fdisk -l is as follows:

Disk /dev/sdc: 3.64 TiB, 4000787025920 bytes, 976754645 sectors
Disk model: Expansion Desk
Units: sectors of 1 * 4096 = 4096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device     Boot Start        End    Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1           1 4294967295 4294967295  16T ee GPT

As can be seen, the disk is detected correctly as a 3.64TiB drive, but there is a partition that's read as 16TB. This, AFAIK, is because the sectors are incorrectly read as 4096 bytes long when they should be 512 bytes, and this is a thing that external enclosures do to ensure MBR compatibility with Windows XP.

I tried overcoming this by mounting as follows:

$ sudo mount -o ro,offset=$((1*512)) /dev/sdc1 /mnt

however now I have a new error:

mount: /mnt: failed to setup loop device for /dev/sdc1.

Trying to mount with sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt only yields

mount: /mnt: special device /dev/sdc1 does not exist.

I'm at a loss as to how to mount this drive - at least, without reformatting it. Is it at all possible? Once I've cracked the code, can I configure /etc/fstab to do it automatically for me, or am I stuck in this limbo-land where I have data on my disk that's only readable with a hacky workaround? As a last resort, I think I can plug it back in via SATA, copy all 4TB off, plug it in via USB, reformat it and copy everything back on, but I want to avoid that hassle.

Edit: Output of fdisk -l when connected via SATA. Note the sector size is now 512 and the drive mounts happily.

Disk /dev/sdb: 3.7 TiB, 4000787030016 bytes, 7814037168 sectors
Disk model: HGST HDN724040AL
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 5852E3A7-A2E4-4589-9D93-F8020C2D7E54

Device     Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sdb1   2048 7814035455 7814033408  3.7T Linux filesystem

Hopefully this is the right community to ask this question in.

I have been tasked with providing a way for a small team to send and receive text messages via a real mobile phone from their computers. Having daily driven Fedora since 2017, my first thought was KDE Connect SMS. Unfortunately, I have to be able to support Windows in this endeavour.

As such, I have three questions:

• KDE connect is available for Windows, however as far as I can figure kpeoplevcard is not. Am I mistaken? Is there a way to get contact names syncing successfully in a Windows environment, even just one-way?
• Despite the notification permission being granted on Android, incoming text messages produce no notification on Windows. I have read this may be a fault that occurs when the Android client was installed from F-Droid. Is this the case? I haven't made a Google account for this device, so perhaps I need to do that and install the Play Store version.
• MMS images appear fine in the KDE Connect SMS application, however they are only thumbnail sized and can not be saved as a file or copied. Can they at least be made bigger, if not exported?

I'm worried that KDE Connect may not be the correct choice for this use-case if these issues don't have workarounds. I may have to use Google's Messages for Web, but that doesn't allow concurrent connections from multiple PCs like KDE Connect does - and it will mean I have to deal with Google.