I’ve got a USB hard drive that is permanently plugged into my desktop, but recently it stopped working. It is formatted from the factory with NTFS, which is fine-ish, in that it does work under Linux without any intervention, but if it stops working, you have to know what to do. I didn’t.

When it stopped responding, I started poking round the Internet, to see if I could find a fix. What I eventually found out was that I needed ntfsfix to correct whatever seemed to go wrong. You point it at the mount point in /dev and then it magically fixes whatever seemed to have gone wrong.

I am hoping that this will get me to a good place, but I think my future is going to include a Network Attached Storage device.