I recently transitioned from Windows to Linux (specifically CachyOS) and I'm still getting the hang of things, so bear with me. I have two hard drives: a 500GB drive for the OS and a 3TB drive for games and other files. For about a week, everything was running smoothly until I started experiencing lag and freezing while playing a game. After a restart, I found that my games were supposedly uninstalled. When I checked the 3TB hard drive, I was met with an error stating: "An error occurred while accessing 'Second Hard Drive', the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting /dev/sdb3 at /run/media/slothjon/Second Hard Drive: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb3, missing codepage or helper program, or other error." Now I can't seem to access my secondary hard drive. Any help would be appreciated!
2 Answers
It sounds like your secondary hard drive could be formatted as NTFS, which can sometimes cause issues on Linux. You might need to install a package that helps Linux interact with NTFS drives. If you're using the Dolphin file manager, you might want to search for how to set up NTFS support for your system. It's usually straightforward, just a quick package install away!
Exactly, just run `pacman -S ntfs-3g` to install it. Make sure to update your packages first with `pacman -Syu`! If the drive isn’t accessible after that, a reboot might be necessary.
First things first, check if your 3TB drive is actually formatted with NTFS. Linux tends to have issues with NTFS drives that are 'dirty' or haven’t been safely ejected. I’d recommend doing a filesystem scan or repair on Windows if you can. Also, turn off any Fast Boot or Hibernate settings in Windows to avoid complications when switching between systems. That error message on Linux is pretty generic, which doesn't help much but troubleshooting NTFS issues typically involves these steps!

Thanks for the tips! I did a little digging and it seems like I'll need to install `ntfs-3g`. Also, CachyOS is based on Arch, right? That should make installation easier.