You might fail to mount a Linux hard disk is the file system of the disk is corrupt. File system corruption may take place due to numerous reasons, ranging from virus infection to hard drive crash. In a practical scenario of this problem, you may encounter the below error message when you try to mount a Linux hard drive
The Mount Command:
“mount: you must specify the filesystem type”
The error occurs every time when you run the mount command. It makes the drive unusable and put you in need of Linux recovery.
Root Cause
You may run across this problem due to any of the following reasons-
Improper editing of the fstab file. Linux uses this file to list out the available hard drives and volumes. The mount command uses this file to determine required
Options.
The disk volume does not contain any file system.
The hard drive file system is damaged.
Superblock is faulty and cannot be accessed by the operating system.
Solution
Use any of the below options to perform data recovery Linux in such cases-Use -t parameter with the mount command. Properly specify all the hard drive entries in the fstab file. It enables mount command to see all the available devices and options. Re-create the file system using mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdXX command.
Use fsck command to fix file system consistency issues.





