Bdtyktl

Looked around for hours, but can't seem to find any advice better than "reformat it with ext3":

I have a Drobo 5D with 20+ TB of usable space, most of which is used with very important data. It has been working flawlessly on Windows, but we're trying to migrate our work over to Ubuntu for a variety of reasons, and the Drobo simply refuses to move with us. It's formatted with NTFS, and I'm trying to mount it on a new Ubuntu 18.04 system.

Using drobo-utils, I can verify that the system is plugged in and looks ready to go, but when I try to mount it, the command just hangs:

sudo mount -t ntfs -o force,rw /dev/sdc2 /data/drobo

When I check the command later:

ps aux | grep mount

root     19309  0.0  0.0  72716  4280 pts/3    S    17:36   0:00 sudo mount -t ntfs -o force,rw /dev/sdc2 /data/drobo

root     19310  0.0  0.0  32448  1332 pts/3    S    17:36   0:00 mount -t ntfs -o force,rw /dev/sdc2 /data/drobo

root     19311  0.0  0.0  21428  2884 pts/3    D    17:36   0:00 /sbin/mount.ntfs /dev/sdc2 /data/drobo -o rw,force

Notice that the CPU time is at 0:00, so it doesn't seem to be doing anything (this is an hour after issuing the command). I've pulled the drobo back off of linux and checked it out on Windows, and everything seems fine. There's too much data on it to try reformatting it at this point. Is there anything particular about NTFS that would be causing this? Or is it an issue with the Drobo in general when using NTFS? Any help would be appreciated.

Although fsck can repair some of the damage done to NTFS, it is not as good as the built-in Windows CHKDSK so run that first on a Windows machine:

CHKDSK /F /R /B

As you're running 18.x, you have the latest ntfs-3g driver installed, so use all of the advanced options in the mount command:

rw,inherit,permissions,streams_interface=windows,windows_names,compression,norecover,hide_dot_files,hide_hid_files,big_writes

and definitely do not force anything.

Having said the above, once you have it running, I strongly advise you to:

• get another external NAS of the same size


• format it using a modern FS like ext4 or btrfs
  


• mount that one Read-Write


• mount the NTFS one Read-Only


• copy the files over as and when you need them to become R/W

Finally when all files are copied:

• Reformat the old one and use it to make rsync or borg backups of all your data.