Solved External ntfs failing after 815Gb written

S

Scotty72

Hi,
I'm running
FreeBSD barracuda 12.1-RELEASE-p3 FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE-p3 GENERIC amd64
as a desktop machine at home.
Some months ago I bought a Seagate Expansion Portable Drive (1 TB SSD USB 3 external drive). It comes with an NTFS partition. I kept it like that as I use it, among other things, to store movies and connect it to a TV (that reads NTFS).
Anyway, it's been working fine: mounting with ntfs-3g flawless, good transfer speed, etc until now.
A couple days ago started to show Input/output errors trying to copy some files to it. Those files appeard to be partially copied but their size is less than the original and, of course, they cannot be open.
The disk is 88% full (815GB out of 932GB).
Version of pkg: fusefs-ntfs-2017.3.23
the error
Code: 
cp: /media/home/jose/figuras/catalogos/year-2016/catalogo-1.pdf: Input/output error

dmesg
Code: 
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus2 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Seagate Expansion 0710> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
da0: Serial Number NAADB3C9
da0: 400.000MB/s transfers
da0: 953869MB (1953525167 512 byte sectors)
da0: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>

/var/log/messages relative to the disk mount:
Code: 
ntfs-3g[1595]: Version 2017.3.23 external FUSE 29
ntfs-3g[1595]: Mounted /dev/da0s1 (Read-Write, label "Seagate Expansion Drive", NTFS 3.1)
ntfs-3g[1595]: Cmdline options:
ntfs-3g[1595]: Mount options: allow_other,nonempty,relatime,fsname=/dev/da0s1
ntfs-3g[1595]: Ownership and permissions disabled, configuration type 1

# smartctl -l selftest /dev/da0
Code: 
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short offline       Completed without error       00%       136         -

I've also run chkdsk on Windows, that said it corrected some errors. But the problem persist in the same way.

I've read the man page, search this forum and other sites but I cannot figure out the problem or find any similar problems.
Are there some known issue or something I'm not taking into account?
Thanks
 
Scotty72 said:
Are there some known issue or something I'm not taking into account?
Click to expand...
Yes, the fact that NTFS-3g is reverse engineered and may contain bugs or wrong assumptions about how NTFS actually works. As none of this is documented (or standardized in any way) Microsoft can just make changes to NTFS and NTFS-3g would fail on that miserably. In short, only write to NTFS with a Microsoft Windows product because that's the only way to do this reliably.
 
Does ntfsfix do anything?

If you need a Microsoft file system (for example to work with your TV), then perhaps convert it to MSDOSFS(5)

I guess then the limitation is with the size of movies, often being over 4GB.

If you want to keep using NTFS, can you mount it on another machine or device? Things like routers often allow USB connected NTFS drives that you can connect to via SMB.
 
Scotty72 said:
I kept it like that as I use it, among other things, to store movies and connect it to a TV (that reads NTFS).
Click to expand...
Any chance your TV supports DLNA (UPnP)? That might be an alternate way of getting the content to the TV. I have a smart TV and have a Plex app on there. That works wonders in combination with multimedia/plexmediaserver running on a FreeBSD machine with 10TB (ZFS) of movies and TV shows. Some smart TVs are also capable of reading from Windows shares. net/samba410 can be used for that. If you don't have a "smart" TV, you may want to have a look at running Kodi on a Raspberry Pi (I like to use LibreElec for that; sadly not FreeBSD based) attached to the TV.
 
Thank you all.
I can try alternate methods to connect to the TV, that shouldn't be a problem. I thought about trying samba through the router USB.
The thing is this disk was working fine and suddenly appeared this error and I'd like to know if I am doing something wrong or something is wrong in my system configuration or what.
I tried ntfsfix and now it shows this (tried it before and was ok):
Code: 
Mounting volume... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Checking the alternate boot sector... FAILED
Error: Failed to fix the alternate boot sector

I've also run chkdsk in Windows and it says something like this (was in spanish so I'm translating):
Code: 
Free space marked as assigned in MFT bitmap
Windows made some corrections
 
Scotty72 said:
The thing is this disk was working fine and suddenly appeared this error and I'd like to know if I am doing something wrong or something is wrong in my system configuration or what.
Click to expand...
The disk is close to 90% full, so it's going to have a more difficult time trying to find free blocks to write to. But as far as I can tell you did absolutely nothing wrong. Except maybe putting a little too much faith into NTFS-3g ;)
 
Ok, so this is it, I think.
The disk works fine in Windows and on the TV (I just checked) so let's just forget about it.
Thank you very much to all of you for your time and fast (and useful) answers.
?
P.S. Do you think would be helpful useful to pass this issue somewhere else (mantainer, tuxera...) ?
 
Scotty72 said:
P.S. Do you think would be helpful useful to pass this issue somewhere else (mantainer, tuxera...) ?
Click to expand...
It's probably something in the code itself, you could definitely try and ask the developer(s). It's certainly possible but I doubt this issue is specific to FreeBSD.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top