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Thread: NTFS is hogging the boot time.... fix/workaround

  1. #1
    Ultimate Member AllGamer's Avatar
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    Arrow NTFS is hogging the boot time.... fix/workaround

    So lately I've been transitioning all my home PCs to Linux, mainly because it runs faster & more stable than Windows, and the fact that everything is easy (from a Techie point of view) and open source, no need to worry about licensing issues.

    (Now in days, many Linux distro are ready for prime time, for work obviously the Red Hat corporate is the standard, but for home use I prefer Ubuntu as it has a huge support base in case you have any question, you'll always find an answer.

    But not all machines specially older models can run the main branch of ubuntu, as it's too heavy/slow, for my older machines 486/Pentium1 I usually run DSL or one of the many light flavors of ubuntu, if you still hang on to a 286 or 386 definitely go for the DSL, nothing else will run smooth on those ancient machines.)

    All the upgrades/transitions have been bang on, until i started my main home server conversion... (so now i'm 1.5 day behind schedule) when i hit the little snatch with Windows NTFS hogging the boot sector of the RAID drives, which will give you the fast blink blink blink cursor in DOS.

    For reference, that is when you try to boot a PC with a HDD that was formatted with NTFS, but you lost the bootable drive, and you get the standard error message NTLDR is missing and regardless of trying to boot from a CD or Floppy Disk, it will always check the HDD to see if the NTFS boot sector is there.

    The only difference that RAIDs made with NTFS, will not give you the error message, and just blinks.

    It'll have been a lot of work if the RAID were not hot/swappable, as my work around was to first boot into Linux then hot start the RAID once the OS was loaded.

    Otherwise the fix would have required the RAIDs to be mounted back with Windows machine, then transfer 15 TB of data via Gigabit + jumbo frames network, which will still take forever, probably take a whole week to transfer all that data from computer A to computer B, as you will need to carefully verify all the copies were done properly, as usual sometimes windows will simply miss or error out on some files.

    So, in the end after the RAIDs gets loaded in Linux, you can convert the NTFS to EXT4, and after the next reboot, no more locked up boot sector waiting for NTFS to be found.

    Just additional info, when you convert NTFS to EXT4, you really need an extra free RAID of the same size, so you can transfer everything over before you can reformat the RAID to EXT4

    As most HDD software like Acronis or Partition Magic, or its open source counterparts (Parted Magic / Partition Wizard) are usually unable to read the RAID in DOS mode, otherwise it'll be even easier, then you can really do the conversion in DOS, and not have to do any of the above.

    Of course that's only applicable to very expensive hardware RAID controllers that is in the average of $400+/-

    That's the trade off of using a cheapo RAID controller, or SoftRAID as some people call it, they work, it does the job, but when it comes to troubleshooting it always require that little extra work.

    Speed wise, it is still waster than OS level Software RAID like the Dynamic drives RAID in Windows, or the Linux mdadm RAID.

    Cheers
    i7-3970X, Corsair H80, 32GB G.SKILL, ASUS RAMPAGE4 Formula, VG278H(3x27")+3D Vision2, EVGA GTX 690(x2), OCZ ZX1250W, 256GB Vertex4(x2), Seagate 3TB(x5), Antec LanBoyAir, Logitech G510, G600, Z560THX, T.Flight Hotas, PZ35, Sennheiser PC163D, TrackIR5

  2. #2
    Ultimate Member AllGamer's Avatar
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    Found another interesting bit in regards to RAID cross-over from Win <--> Linux

    if your NTFS RAID happened to have been made using the "new" GUID option from Win2k3, when you move them to Linux they become unreadable

    Standard NTFS RAID non GUID are easy as pie, just plug and play and they can work on Linux without any conversion.

    Found that after successfully converting the previous 3 sets of RAID 4.5TB / 6.0 TB on NTFS to EXT3 in just a few hours.

    (EXT3 is backward compatible with EXT2, with its wide set of repair tools, EXT4 uses new technique which makes old EXT2 repair tools useless, in other words, not disaster recovery friendly)

    but when I went to convert the last set of NTFS RAID 4.5TB in Linux it was detected as "Unknown" yet as soon as you hook it back into a 2003 server, it reads up just fine, and the difference was that this particular NTFS RAID was sitting on top of a GUID volume instead of the standard volumes.
    i7-3970X, Corsair H80, 32GB G.SKILL, ASUS RAMPAGE4 Formula, VG278H(3x27")+3D Vision2, EVGA GTX 690(x2), OCZ ZX1250W, 256GB Vertex4(x2), Seagate 3TB(x5), Antec LanBoyAir, Logitech G510, G600, Z560THX, T.Flight Hotas, PZ35, Sennheiser PC163D, TrackIR5

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