Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with ntfs

Reinstall Windows dealing with NTFS permissions

chrisch — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:58:21 -0800

I'm a few weeks away from rebuilding my PC with Windows 7 and need help understanding how to deal with NTFS permissions. I'm a few weeks away from rebuilding my PC with Windows 7. I'm currently using the release candidate of Windows 7 with the following drive configuration:

C:\ - Windows and applications (some data)
D:\ - data drive (including "D:\My Documents\")
Q:\ - external backup drive (Drobo)

All drives are formatted with NTFS and backups of selected directories to Q:\ are done with rsync. I've noticed that some directories on Q:\ are not accessible by the Guest account, meaning that permissions are not consistent on that drive. The machine isn't on a domain.

My plan is to wipe C:\ and reinstall Windows, and leave D:\ and Q:\ alone. My questions are:

- How do I reinstall and prevent ugly situations with NTFS file permissions (i.e., permission denied)?
- Is there a best practices guide for syncing to my backup drive to ease future accessibility from another computer?

Many thanks!

My server needs more space!

gregr — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:08:33 -0800

One of my servers needs more space, but due to several reasons I can't add space directly to the server... I have a server that I use for backup and restore. When doing a restore BackupExec uses the local hard drive to store the data while it is being read off of tape.

I have a giant restore that is using all of the space on the drive in the machine. I can't add another physical drive because the server is in a blade center and the blade only has one hard drive slot. (I might be able to use an external hard drive, but because of the way the Blade Center shares USB ports none of the other blades would be able to use USB.)

So, some of the other servers on the network have extra drive space, but BackupExec will not restore to a mapped network drive. I've also tried making symbolic links directly to the other servers on the network using Junction, MkLink, Junction LinkMagic, and several other tools. I've also tried mapping a network drive then making symbolic links to the folders on the network drive.

Does anyone have suggestions about how to trick BackupExec into writing to a drive that is not physically attached to the backup server?

Best partition size for 1tb NTFS drive?

patrad — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:04:14 -0800

Is there any speed advantage to partitioning a 1 TB hard drive? I plan on using it as an NTFS drive in Windows XP SP3. It's primary purpose will be mass storage for my pictures and media so it will be read a lot. My OS and Program Files reside on another physical drive.

Restore Deleted NTFS Drive?

B(oYo)BIES — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:17:17 -0800

FileSystemHelp: I really messed up while installing Windows 7. I wasn't paying attention and marked my secondary drive for deletion (clicked on the drive, clicked delete). I then realized that this was my 1TB drive, with all of my files and pictures on it. I closed out of the installer and rebooted. I booted back into the Windows 7 installer and it still showed the drive as deleted. I did not format the drive. I was hoping that once I got Windows 7 installed I could assign the drive a letter and all would be good. When I got into windows, the disk manager shows the drive is RAW. I assigned it a disk letter, but cannot restore it to NTFS. I have searched online, and tried tools like Testdisk and GetDataBack. Maybe I don't know what I am doing, but I am not able to restore the file system or see my files. I scanned with GetDataBack NTFS and it was able to see a good ammount of files, but I only recognized 2 or 3 and they were nothing I am after. GetDataBack shows the disk as Fat-16Huge, so I am scanning it with GetDataBack FAT which is currently at 1% with 23 hours remaining. I am also analysing the disk with TestDisk, currently at 13%, but I am not even sure what I can do with that when completed.

Is there ANY way to get the disk to read as NTSF again? If not, I would assume that my only option is recovering files, so do you have any advice knowing my current situation? My stomach is upside down right now and I would appreciate ANY advice.

Thanks in advance.

NTFS, I hate you

devilsbrigade — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:18:45 -0800

I have a 300gb SATA drive, NTFS formatted, that has most of my movies & music on it. After a lengthy move and installing a new operating system on a different drive, it's done something I never have seen before: about half the files on the disk point to some random location of the disk, so movie files go to the middle of MP3s, MP3s go to random places in entirely unrelated MP3s, etc. It's a massive mess. I ran the NTFS repair utility (without doing a backup, stupid) and it only had the effect of setting about half of the affected files' sizes to zero. I'm fairly sure at this point it's a lost cause, and I'll save what I can & reformat, but has anyone run into this problem before? Is there some magical way out? What on earth could have caused it?

Convert FAT32 to NTFS without data loss

NoMich — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:05:53 -0800

Is it possible to convert an external drive that is FAT32 to NTFS on Windows Vista without any data loss on the drive?

What is the proper way to safely unplug USB drives?

kampken — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:41:55 -0800

I've heard many different explanations about how to unplug drives in Windows XP. Some insist on using the removal tool and others just yank it out. So actually i have a matter of questions which i hope someone with the proper expertise can answer. 1) What exactly does the "safe removal" tool in Windows XP do and it is any different than just waiting until the drive isn't writing and then unplugging it?

2) Is there any increased risk by running a NTFS filesystem on the usb flashdrive than the more common FAT on these devices? I use NTFS to move around bigger files than FAT32 can support, but i heard something about NTFS being more prone to data corruption when unplugged prematurely, than FAT systems.

3) What happens when you have some drives plugged in and then shut down your computer? (proper shutdown, not forced) Does Windows safely unplug these drives automatically when shutting down?

Thanks in advance

Recover files from NTFS disk image?

dmd — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 16:37:27 -0800

A relative's Windows XP (NTFS) machine was accidentally reinstalled from a recovery partition. We need to recover as much as possible from this reformatted disk. I bought a new external hard drive, booted into Knoppix and created a disk image file using "dd if=/dev/sda of=/mount/newexternal/disk.image" ... which is to say that the entire physical disk is stored as a file on the new disk.

1) What are some good tools I can use (best would be from within OS X, second best from Knoppix) to try and recover files from that image?

2) How can I get those tools to read from that image? Will there be issues mounting it via loopback since it's an image of an entire physical disk, not of a partition? How can I get around that?

How to merge (not replace) NTFS permissions using Robocopy

MrHappyGoLucky — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:27:20 -0800

I am currently attempting to migrate files from an NT 4.0 file server to a NetApp filer appliance. Our current copy process (using Robocopy) will replace the target permissions with the source permissions. We would prefer to merge source permissions with target permissions, leaving any differing target permissions intact. Currently, Robocopy will replace the target permissions with the permissions present on the source, erasing any additions to the file ACLs on the target. We would prefer to merge the source permission ACEs onto the target file ACLs, preserving the additions made on the target files.

I can't seem to find if Robocopy supports this behavior, does anyone have any suggestions on how to accomplish this?

How do I mount a FAT32 drive on Vista?

Plug Dub In — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:19:27 -0800

I've got about 200 GB of files on my old Mac that I need to put on my shiny new Vista-running laptop. I've got a 300 GB USB drive. This should be easy... I formatted the disk as FAT32 on my Mac and copied all the files over. I plug it into the PC, and I get nada. Research says Vista don't like FAT32 for big disks at all.

I know about convert x: /FS:NTFS (or whatever that command was) but the drive doesn't have a letter and I can't seem to give it one.

If I reformat the drive as NTFS, my Mac won't be able to read it, right? I'm not really comfortable with MacFUSE, and MacFusion (the GUI version) only comes with FTP and SSH support.

I've got Virtual PC running XP, and VirtualBox running Ubuntu. Will either of those help?

NTFS folder timestamp metadata

Barrows — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:10:49 -0800

In NTFS if you have a file at the bottom of a directory tree like c:\a\b\c\d\file.txt and the file is modified (thereby changing the time/date stamp on the file) is there some way of detecting that by looking at information (err metadata?) in the folder node itself - in other words does NTFS flag a folder as containing items that have changed. Because right now it seems like the timestamp for d\ is fixed at the time it was first created and does not change when its contents change. We want to write a program that will let us know that we should look in some folder because it knows something changed in there. we want to have to avoid drilling down and looking at the files because there are jazillions of them. Oh and it needs to be agentless - no tripwire

Sunday computer problems..... ahhh yeah.

thatguyryan — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:29:09 -0800

First time with formatting partitions or installing linux. I bought a new 200gb harddrive for my laptop. I put it in, and created 3 partitions - Drive C: a 30 gb on which i installed xp, Drive D: a 30 gb on which i plan to install for the first time a linux (maybe ubuntu), and Drive E: a 126 gb partition which i intend to house files i will want to access from either OS. At this point, everything is fine except.... that 3rd (126 gb) partition is RAW and windows right-click to format doesn't give me an option to format in FAT -only in NTFS. Am I correct that if I want to use that drive to read and write files from with both ubuntu and xp i should probably (as a noob) make it be FAT? Should the xp partition be FAT ? (It's NTFS right now.) The one i plan on being for the ubuntu is FAT32. If that third large partition needs to be FAT, how can i do that? As with all computer-solution-needed situations, easy is great; free is best. Thank you so much. Long live metafilter.

How can I share a mounted NTFS volume over AFP?

DLWM — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:01:14 -0800

Networkfilter: I have a NTFS volume mounted on my OS X Server box. I'd like to access it over the net using AFP. It's not showing up as an available AFP share. What gives? The NTFS volume mounts fine on the server:



admin@os-x-server$ sudo mount_smbfs //user@windows-fileserver/SHARE ~/ntfsdir

Password: os-x-server-password

Password: windows-password

admin@os-x-server$ ls -l ~ | grep ntfsdir

drwxr-xr-x    1 admin  staff  16384 Dec 31  1969 ntfsdir

admin@os-x-server$ ls -l ~/ntfsdir

drwxr-xr-x   1 admin  staff    16384 Feb 23 05:27 dir1

drwxr-xr-x   1 admin  staff    16384 Jun  3 09:42 dir2

drwxr-xr-x   1 admin  staff    16384 Apr 15 16:24 dir3

.

.

.

So it's mounting fine and the permissions look okay. In the Workgroup Manager for the OS X Server, ~/ntfsdir is set as a share point, owner is given read and write access, and AFP is enabled for that share. But when I try to mount the AFP share on my local machine, I get the following error:



user@os-x-client$ sudo mount_afp afp://admin:password@os-x-server/ntfsdir ~/afpdir

Password: os-x-client-password

mount_afp: the mount flags are 0000 the altflags are 0020

mount_afp: AFPMountURL returned error -5019, errno is 2

user@os-x-client$

Google says that error -5019 means bad share name. And indeed, when I use Connect to Server... from the the Finder on the client machine, the share ntfsdir doesn't show up, even though it's enabled in the Workgroup Manager, AFP access is on, and owner has full read/write permissions to the share (both in AFP share config and in the server's filesystem itself).

Even weirder, the I can't even mount the share over AFP from within the server itself! I get the following error:



admin@os-x-server$ sudo mount_afp afp://admin:password@localhost/ntfsdir ~/testdir

Password: os-x-server-password

mount_afp: the mount flags are 0000 the altflags are 0020

mount_afp: AFPMountURL returned error -5019, errno is 32

admin@os-x-server$

So for some reason this share is not being advertised properly. I've tried making other test AFP shares, and they work fine... it must have something to do that I'm trying to share a directory that is itself a mount point for a mounted NTFS share.

I don't see why the AFP service even knows that ~admin/ntfsdir (on the server) is an NTFS mounted share... seems like it should just be another directory in the filesystem, from its perspective. Unless it's a permissions thing that I'm missing, although, like I said, the permissions for ~admin/ntfsdir look good; I can browse the mounted NTFS volume on the server through the command line, etc.

Any clever suggestions for me?

My computer's gone HAL on me!

edbyford — Tue, 06 May 2008 05:45:02 -0800

It appears that chkdsk has corrupted some of my files. How can I stop this happening? I restarted my computer one day (just to refresh it, not because of an update, new program or crash) and it ran chkdsk automatically, which I thought was strange.

It found several errors in a folder of music I have in My Documents. It said it fixed them so I thought nothing of it, until a couple of days later I was looking over my backup logs and my backup program (JungleDisk) had noticed that some of my music files had been modified, so had made copies of them. The files were the same ones chkdsk had scanned and "fixed" a few days before. I thought I'd better check out the files, so I went to the folder (whose name was corrupted btw) and tried to play them...but although the files still showed the correct size, they wouldn't play! They were corrupt!

This has really shaken my confidence in my PC. I am running Win XP Home with NTFS. I have a large music collection, and am left wondering: why these files corrupted? how many MP3s and other files have I lost without realising?

Can anybody offer an explanation of the problem? Is there anything I can do to stop this happening again?

FAT3000?

tmcw — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:33:58 -0800

I think I'm finally switching to Ubuntu on my main machine. I have two 160GB external drives, currently both with NTFS, currently mirrored (by software, not a RAID). With what and how should I format/use these guys? Currently both drives have about 60 gigs used. I have 80 or so gigs on my laptop. I'd like them to be accessible by Windows in a clutch, and eventually (about a year) I'm getting a mac laptop, so I'll need to switch to that too. But my primary goal is to get a good Linux / Windows formatting scheme for the meantime. They're filled with music and school documents - no applications at this point. I'm aiming to use VirtualBox or similar (any suggestions?) to run Windows, so that might decide their accessibility?

Thanks!

Connect my drive to my mac please!

smithmac_99 — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:40:47 -0800

How do I connect my NTFS hard drive to my new mac? Based on this question, I yanked my old drives and put them in a USB 2.0 enclosure. I can plug them in to my laptop and they mount fine, but when I plug them into my mac, zippo...What did I do wrong?

NTFS hard drive keeps switching to RAW.

itchylick — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 07:13:27 -0800

Why does my hard drive keep losing it's file system and switching from NTFS to RAW? This has happened several times in the past two weeks. I was able to restore all the lost data using a program called GetDataBack for NTFS and have copied everything to two other hard drives, so everything is safe for now. I am now able to run a quick format on the drive each time this happens and copy all the data back over.

So why does this keep happening? Could it be:

1) A recently added DVD drive on the same cable as the troubled hard drive? Neither is using a jumper pin and they both have been apparently working fine together.
2) My new iPod causing confusion?
3) The hard drive itself failing?

I have run error-checking on the drive, but I don't get any kind of log, so I assume no problems were found. I'm not getting any of the other telltale signs of a drive on the verge of death either.

It just seems to be that the file system is getting corrupted on the occasional reboot, but all other data is left intact just waiting to be restored. I hate to buy a new hard drive only to find out that something else was the problem.

Any ideas? Thanks.

All the programs in the world and I can't find this one

EllenC — Sat, 26 May 2007 08:50:09 -0800

How do I change Extended File Attributes (also known as NTFS File Attributes) like Title, other than one at a time? I have a few hundred files called things like 1234_ABCDE.htm. I'd like to rename them to 1234.htm, which I can easily make a command file to do. But then I'd like the ABCDE part to be in one of the extended attributes that show up in file explorer or any folder window if I pick those columns (in Windows XP).

I don't want to do this one at a time using the Properties dialog Summary tag, but can't find any utility that lets me change these attributes any other way. I can't believe someone hasn't written one, but finding it - or writing one myself - is beyond me.

How do I recover a lost filesystem that has been partially overwritten?

oneous — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 14:00:49 -0800

I accidentally formatted my NTFS drive with HFS and wrote some data on it. Now how do I recover whatever is left? >>>Any filesystem experts around here? I was installing Mac OS 9 on an old iMac and accidentally chose the installation volume as my big external USB disk with all my important data. I had 250GB of files in NTFS on it, and the Mac OS 9 install was only a few hundred MB, so there should still be a large amount of data untouched. I want to recover anything I can (including partial/corrupted files) that still remain in NTFS.

I'd appreciate some app/method recommendations, as well as some help understanding how filesystems work and what exactly has happened.

Partitioning Wizard My Ass . . .

datacenter refugee — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 21:18:54 -0800

An unlucky series of partition moves, copies and resizes has led to GPartEd saying my NTFS partition is one size, but windows thinking it's another. What the Christ? Seemingly impossible screenshots and Order of events:

- Installed Feisty using the 'resize NTFS partition and used freed-up space' option. Accidentally made my windows partition 13 GBs (my bad).
- Began attempting to fix this - resized ubuntu root partition to ~10GBs. Screenshot here.
- Got to this state, where I had things as I wanted. If this state was real, I'd be happy.
- Upon booting into windows, I found this.

If I remove 1GB of files from the NTFS partition in windows, the same amount is removed from the GPartED representation of that partition in lunix. I've attempted to resize again in the hopes of it 'shocking' windows into realizing the size of the partition, but no dice. Honestly I don't know which of the two operating systems is telling me the truth.

I would really like to get the NTFS partition utilize the 12+ GBs it's not recognizing. Any ideas?

Some music doesn't load in iTunes for XP but works fine on Mac

TurkeyMustard — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:25:58 -0800

Some music copied from an Mac drive to a Windows drive doesn't load in iTunes on Windows XP. I have about 190GB of music (about 35,000 songs) on a FAT32 drive plugged into an ordinary tower Compaq via USB2. The music was formerly used in iTunes on Mac OS X 10.4.8 on a big HFS+ drive, but I copied it off to other drives, reformatted the big drive (which is less than three months old) as FAT32 and then copied the music back.

However, when I import the songs into iTunes for XP, only 90GB (about 19,000 songs) show up in the program. They all show up fine in iTunes for Mac OS X. Both are using the latest iTunes. I've tried numerous reimports with no luck. I've also tried a smaller drive, with a subset of files, but only part of those showed up in iTunes, too.

Thinking it might be a problem with copying, I've also copied the data over a second time to the drive reformatted as NTFS. I've also tried copying the data from Mac drives to the Windows drive using the Macdrive software to mount the Macs in Windows. I've also tried copying using SMB filesharing, using FTP, and using a weird Parallels-folder-sharing combo. All with no change in how many files import.

So, what I'm looking for is ideas on what might be the problem. Is it strange Mac-only characters or Mac-only names? I have a lot of international music with foreign characters. But shouldn't FAT32 handle accents, tildes, umlauts, and whatever just fine? Just in case, I ran a few scripts that clean up a bunch of strange characters, but it didn't seem to change the number of songs that would import.

Is it possible metadata embedded in files cannot be used? Some of the music probably does include metadata in various kinds of ID tags, and maybe also includes album art (though I have no way of determining that, I think).

Are there permissions or privileges that should be changed on the copied files?

Any ideas or tricks to try would be appreciated. I'm reluctant to just abandon 100GB of music.

File systems for Mac and PC

emoeby — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 10:38:05 -0800

I just bought my first Mac and I keep finding conflicting reports when it comes to file systems. All of my music and photos are on an external drive, formatted NTFS. Will OS X be able to read/write to it, or will I have to backup the files and reformat? I still need to be able to connect the external HD to a PC on occasion, but it will primarily be used with the Mac. Thanks in advance!

Too many files?

chef_boyardee — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 08:12:22 -0800

Is it possible for Windows 2000/XP (or more properly, an NTFS disk volume) to "collapse" under the weight of too many files? I have about a million specialized data files spread out on about a hundred CDs (no, it's not porn) and would like to load them onto one of those 500 GB Firewire drives formatted with NTFS. I will spread them out among multiple directories, at least so that directory operations in various applications won't grind the OS to a halt.

But I have some concerns about whether a huge number of files could corrupt the volume somehow or invite read/write problems. Doesn't it take a lot of storage merely to index a million files?

How many files is "too many"? Is there any advantage to putting massive collections like this into zip files (if so I'd be using command line info-zip)?

Partitions, windows’ and linux, Oh My!

nazca — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:06:50 -0800

I’ve got a new 400gb drive heading my way, plus a free copy of Vista. What is the best way to rebuild my system, with XP, Vista sharing files etc. with maybe a little Ubuntu thrown in? There’s So basically I’m thinking I want a partition for each of the OS’s and one for my files. That way I can backup my OS installs and my files easily and independently.

Oh, and I want my files to be OS agnostic. That is, I’d like to have ONE set of files, that I would use in XP and Vista, and maybe, but not as importantly Ubuntu as well. That’s not asking for moon, right?

Ok, maybe it is, and I have no idea. What would you do in this situation?

Would you go with a 3 (or 4, with linux) partition setup?

If so how would you format the partition for my files? Apparently Vista comes with a new version of NTFS, not remarkable, but apparently you need to use it if you want to use a fancy new auto-backup feature (“Shadow Folders”). I’m guessing this won’t be easy to access with Linux, or maybe even XP for that matter. But shadow folders sound pretty good (if they work as billed).

Would you bother getting fancy with the Vista install to salvage currently installed programs (~100 that I actually use)? (ie. making a copy of my current disk image, and then upgrading that to Vista) Would that bring along the crud that is slowing my current XP install?

I have yet to decide whether I’m going to install XP fresh, or keep the current install. If it makes a difference for setting the dual/triple boot system up I would fresh install.

I’ve never used a dual boot system before, so I’m not familiar with much of what I’m talking about.

How can I reuse a Windows hard drive as an external Mac hard drive without losing my data?

frenchbenj — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 13:14:09 -0800

How can I reuse a Windows hard drive as an external Mac hard drive without losing my data? I have a Windows machine with an additional hard drive on which I have 140GB + of media files. I want to get rid of the machine altogether and use that hard drive, in an enclosure, as an external hard drive with my Mac (via USB connection).

I know Windows uses NTFS, which mounts as read-only on a Mac, so I would need to change the file system type.

Can I do that without doing any kind of formatting? I don't have 140GB available on my mac, so I would have to burn 30 DVD's, which I'd obviously like to avoid.

In other words, is there a Mac utility I can use to convert the hard drive from NTFS to HFS?