I have a knack for breaking things. I have now broken my usb drive. I did some... interesting things with it, and I've run into some issues. Basically, I used VMWare player on windows 7 to make a vm with windows vista, and I had it install directly to the usb drive. Took forever, but it worked. (why I did it that way I can explain, but it's kind of a long story.) So the vm was successfully made, but I ran into an issue when I tried to suspend the vm, i.e. make a copy of the system and store it so I can go directly back to where I was before. Turns out I had formatted it as fat32, and the image file was larger than 4gb. So I shut down the vm without saving the image, and used "convert E: /fs:ntfs". It ran for a moment, and then returned an error about the disk. So I then ran "chkdsk /r" and it went through and fixed the disk (supposedly). I then ran "convert E: /fs:ntfs" and eveything went wonderfully. I started the vm back up and it worked great, and it suspended just fine. So I unmounted the drive, and transferred it over to my laptop which is running Ubuntu Gnome 15.04. I plugged it in and started Vmware, directed it to the necessary files, and boom it started up. The issues started when I went back to the previous computer with windows 7. I tried to boot up the vm, but it simply came up with an error, and would just shut back down. So I went back to my laptop and it worked fine, back to the desktop wouldn't work, back to laptop and now it wouldn't show up on Ubuntu. Tried making a file and mounting it at the point
"sudo mkdir -p /media/usb" and then
"sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usb" and it returned this message:
"NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?"
So I'm a bit stuck, I've run a few other commands to get info, but I don't know much about this, so I don't know what to do with it. I apologize for the length of the post. Any help is much appreciated.