Indy-metro help with dying NTFS HDD

[Don Symes]

Does anyone reasonably close to Indianapolis have a copy of diskinternals' NTFS repair and undelete I can come use?

My external library drive is coughing something awful and that's where my music library and a mess of old notes live (100GB or so). I've switched to a G4 Mac, so I can't run the repair on my own box even if I could afford the program.

[Steve A.]

Does anyone reasonably close to Indianapolis have a copy of diskinternals' NTFS repair and undelete I can come use?

My external library drive is coughing something awful and that's where my music library and a mess of old notes live (100GB or so). I've switched to a G4 Mac, so I can't run the repair on my own box even if I could afford the program.

Just wondering if you can copy your external drive to a second external drive (or is it too far gone?) Can you even plug it into your G4 Mac...? I know nothing about Macs.

You might want to print out a directory listing so that you know exactly what you have to replace if it dies altogether.

While I believe that NTFS is preferable for an internal drive, I wonder if it is indeed best for an external drive (assuming that the external drive is not a boot drive, but just used for storage).

Good luck!

Steve Ahola

[Don Symes]

The directory listing is a good idea ... 14000 tracks worth of MP3s, a couple thousand photos ... I can probably print that 4-up. Given that OS-X is BSD unix in nice makeup, does anyone know the linux <i><b>ls</b></i> switches to list only the directories and not the files?

At the time, FAT32 under XP wouldn't format the drive, so I gave up and went with NTFS. A bit later, I switched to the Mac and learned that, while OS-X reads NTFS just fine (or so it seemed), it won't write to it. I then got a big-a**ed external for the Mac and made the transfer. That drive is in Oregon now, and has been reported as missing.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I tried a cheap NAS box and ... got my money's worth (fan died, drive fried).

Part two of the difficulty is that the CDs are long gone, too, so rebuilding will be a very expensive enterprise if I can't rescue the garbled stuff.

(I know this sort of thing wasn't this subforum's purpose, so sorry about the hijack, and thanks!)

[Steve Conner]

Hmm, it looks like your best bet is to buy another external drive (get one that's already formatted FAT32, they mostly are nowadays) and try to copy across as much as you can as soon as possible. That would be a good plan even (some would say especially) if you're planning to let a NTFS repair tool loose on it, in case it screws it up even more.

The Linux guys deliberately didn't allow write access to NTFS because they weren't comfortable that they had it fully figured out. (MS doesn't publish a spec so they had to reverse engineer it, AFAIK) So I have the same problem with my new audio workstation that dual boots XP and Studio-To-Go. I had to format the audio drive FAT32 and live with the 4GB file size limit.

I don't think the ls command has a switch to show directories only. You could try

ls -1 -F -R | grep /

the -1 forces one entry per line, -R makes it list any subdirectories too, -F makes it put a slash after everything that's a directory, the | pipes the output into the grep command, and grep / tosses away all lines that don't have a slash. You might need -A too to stop it listing the parent directory and its subdirectories (and hence ultimately everything on your machine)

I should spend less time with computers and more time with tubes

[dai h.]

USB connecting external drives don't seem to be too expensive now, maybe around $120 for a 250GB (came in a case w/connectors and switching AC adaptor, pre-formatted so you can use it right away)? Have one here temporarily for someone that wanted to transfer files from his old PC. It's FAT32 and one difference I noticed from NTFS is a limit on file size (4gigs?). There are also little adaptor things so you can do the same with an IDE or SATA drive (USB connecting or maybe Fire Wire, etc.), maybe around $30-50.

[Don Symes]

Guess I'll have to wait until I can dig up a replacement drive, then.

Thanks fellas!

[bob p]

FWIW I've resisted the temptation to back-up my data onto an external USB drive. Although USB drives are great for transferring the occasional file, I don't think that they're the best solution for backing up your data. When I have to perform a 200 GB backup the procedure can take hours, and every USB drive I've ever used gets way too hot when its reading/writing for that long non-stop. I really don't think they're designed to handle that sort of duty cycle.

For my backup purposes, I've build a dedicated file server out of an old PC. It keeps a mirror image of the data on two internal drives, and there's plenty of airflow for cooling. Other PCs access the data on that PC over the network. That way, if one drive ever fails, I still have a copy of the data on the other drive.

I prefer using a dedicated file server to using an external USB drive, partly because I don't want insufficient cooling to cause a problem with my data.

Just my $0.02. YMMV, of course.

Edit: one thing I thought I might add -- Steve brings up a good point about storing your data on a device that uses a proprietary encoding format. A vendor has you by the balls if you ever need some sort of advanced disk recovery utility. Once you get all of your data stored safely, you might want to look into storing your data on a disk that uses a file system that is not proprietary -- that way the recovery tools won't cost you. Do you have the option to use Ext3 or Reiser on your Mac?

[bob p]

I should spend less time with computers and more time with tubes

Amen to that!

[Don Symes]

FWIW I've resisted the temptation to back-up my data onto an external USB drive. Although USB drives are great for transferring the occasional file, I don't think that they're the best solution for backing up your data.

I prefer using a dedicated file server to using an external USB drive, partly because I don't want insufficient cooling to cause a problem with my data.

Do you have the option to use Ext3 or Reiser on your Mac?

When all you have is laptops ...

Finally got hold of a replacement drive, though, so I'm a little closer.

When I built this drive in the first place, the WinXP laptop I had couldn't/wouldn't complete a FAT32 format. Tired of fighting it, NTFS worked.

The Mac (G4 iBook) can read and write Ext3 and Reiser formats, and for an external, data-only drive, I may do that, but I'd rather build a server. I would ALWAYS have rather built a server.

[dai h.]

FWIW I've resisted the temptation to back-up my data onto an external USB drive. Although USB drives are great for transferring the occasional file, I don't think that they're the best solution for backing up your data. When I have to perform a 200 GB backup the procedure can take hours, and every USB drive I've ever used gets way too hot when its reading/writing for that long non-stop. I really don't think they're designed to handle that sort of duty cycle.

For my backup purposes, I've build a dedicated file server out of an old PC. It keeps a mirror image of the data on two internal drives, and there's plenty of airflow for cooling. Other PCs access the data on that PC over the network. That way, if one drive ever fails, I still have a copy of the data on the other drive.

I prefer using a dedicated file server to using an external USB drive, partly because I don't want insufficient cooling to cause a problem with my data.

I don't know enough to have a definitive opinion but USB-connected hard drives just have a regular hard drive in them. And you can buy cases to put your own drive in, these usually boast alu enclosures and some have internal fans. While RAID should be faster, IME USB external drives seem to work okay and the USB 2.0 data transfer rate seems decent enough.Firewire ones seemed to be generally more expensive, so while a PC with RAID sounds faster and more reliable with reduncy of data, USB drives don't appear to be a bad choice price/performance wise since you need another hard drive, another PC (chassis, mobo, cpu, memory, power supply, OS, etc.) and use more power and space. Depends on the amount of data but since hard drive space isn't that expensive these days. I think you could buy one to put backup data on and set it aside for not very much.Maybe about $130 for a 320G plus USB case (100 for the drive, 30 for the case)? Maybe around $70 for 250G? Plus you can easily take the USB drive with you (conversely the dedicated RAID PC would be harder to steal though I suppose, lol...).

[bob p]

Dai, I agree with everything you said. It turned out that an external drive just didn't work out for me, as all of the ones that I tried to use got way too hot. But then I was doing backups that beat on them for 4 hours straight every day. For the kind of work that I was doing (daily system images) it was just too hard on them. for just copying files, the duty cycle is lower and I think they'd be fine.

Don, if you're interested in building a backup server, its really not that hard to do if you're at all familair with BSD or Linux. The good news is that just about any PC that you have would do a decent job as an automated backup type of box. In my case, I'm using an old P2 right now. All that it does is wake up in the middle of the night, scan the network for new files, copy them, and power down.

There are a couple of really good, enterprise-quality solutions that are open source/free of cost: Amanda and Bacula. Both are available in Linux, but I don't know about ports to BSD. The nice thing about Bacula is that it comes with a client that runs on your Win Boxes and Linux boxes so that all of the PCs can easily cooperate with the backup server. Its a pretty slick system.

[dai h.]

I see. For the sort of heavy use that you describe the dedicated RAID box does sound much more appropriate. In fact I saw one today which was a commercial unit consisting of 4x400G RAID HDs in a box with a cpu and memory which looked to me like basically the same thing.

[bob p]

Yes, there are products like the "yellowbox" that are essentially NAS (network attached storage) devices. The better ones use some form of data redundancy like RAID to safeguard the data. It seems that all of these boxes are essentially linux fileservers with a snappy user interface.

Just in case anyone is interested in one of these things, before you take the plunge it would be good to verify that the device uses hardware RAID rather than software RAID. Many of the "hardware" RAID cards that you can buy today are actually cards that perform RAID at the software level. SW RAID is BAD, as it trades off reliability (the entire point of having a RAID system) for low price. If you have a hiccup on a SW RAID machine, like a memory error or a CPU lockup, you lose the integrity of your RAID array, which is a total disaster. You might be able to rebuild the array (very time consuming), but then you might not. With HW RAID that can't happen. Unfortunately, HW RAID is very expensive -- a good 3Ware card will cost about $300.

There's lots of good info about this kind of stuff on many of the linux forums just in case it piques anyone's interest.

[Don Symes]

Don, if you're interested in building a backup server, its really not that hard to do if you're at all familair with BSD or Linux. The good news is that just about any PC that you have would do a decent job as an automated backup type of box. In my case, I'm using an old P2 right now. All that it does is wake up in the middle of the night, scan the network for new files, copy them, and power down.

I repeat - when all you have is laptops ...

If I get hold of a desktop, one of its jobs will be to serve the music from a mirror pair.

[bob p]

I repeat - when all you have is laptops ...

If I get hold of a desktop, one of its jobs will be to serve the music from a mirror pair.

Don, I have built many linux file servers for serving music and video over a LAN. The horsepower that you need for this type of application is insignificant. You can do it with something as slow as a Pentium-I box that has no RAID. Its trivial to create mirrored backups using a script.

Given that these type of PCs cost about $5 on the used market, price shouldn't constitute much of an impediment. I even have one that you can have for free if you'd be willing to come to Lake county to get it, or if you'd pay the freight to Indy.