Hi all,

I don't know if this problem is in fact due to ntfs-3g, but it may be.

I've been running Ubuntu with ntfs-3g. I have a large ntfs drive I use to store media. One day I opened an .mp3 file, and VLC instead played a bunch of snippets of other files on the drive (including video) spliced together. Weird.

All the other songs I tried behaved like that, but all the videos--which were in a separate folder--I tried played fine. Thinking some part of my disk must be failing, I ran a S.M.A.R.T. self-test, but it came back clean. Then I ran chkdsk, it returned and fixed some errors, but I read the log and nothing seemed relevant to this particular problem. Tried playing some songs and they were the same. Then I defragged the whole volume and tried playing songs again. Now, instead of playing, say, 10 seconds of video, 5 seconds of the middle of a random song, etc., VLC would play a continuous song, but it was still totally random, began in the middle, and didn't correspond at all to the filename. It's like the hard drive is just putting the needle down in the middle of the record and playing whatever's there.

I haven't done any major operations to half of my drive since the last time I played a song. And my drive doesn't seem to be failing. So something must have silently corrupted the filesystem?

After trying to fix this a little while longer and talking to others, I'm almost certain this is an ntfs-3g problem.

tl;dr: I was using an ntfs partition as my Ubuntu home folder without issue for a year. One day, I noticed opening any file would give me some other file's data. All the data seems to be there, just not paired with the right file. How can I reverse this? Can the "map" in the file system re-calibrate itself to map the files to their correct data? Can you give me any insight into why this is happening?

Thank you.

Hi,


Which ntfs-3g version are you using ?

Copying from a backup is probably the best way.

No.

This can be caused by not unmounting properly, and not starting chkdsk immediately after an improper unmount (power failure, etc.).

Regards

Jean-Pierre

Whatever the latest version in the Ubuntu repos was as of two weeks ago. I've re-installed my OS since then.

Of course this wouldn't be an issue if I had a backup, but unfortunately I don't. I guess I'm screwed then. Gonna stick with ext4 from now on as I presume it doesn't have this problem.

Thank you for the feedback jpa.