Accessing NTFS crashes my Gentoo

lars_msh · n00b Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 50 Location: Airstrip One

Well this is a weird one... I've had rather a lot of crashes (system suddenly freezes completely) since I installed Gentoo, and I think most if not all of them are down to accessing NTFS...

Certain things that would crash my system (with ntfs mounted, but not without):

find / -name foo
updatedb

...and... copying certain files/directories off NTFS onto my ext3-based home directory.

I say "certain" files because in general I can access it ok. NTFS read-only support works (haven't tried write, don't intend to) and in the case of copying a directory I didn't use any fancy tools, just plain old cp -r.

In the end I zipped up the offending directory (it's rather large, so I only know that something in there somewhere was triggering a crash) within Windows, copied it over to Linux and then unzipped.

This is NTFS used by Windows 2000 server by the way. I don't mind too much now, I will reformat the partition before long with ext3. Just wondered if anyone else has seen this? If nothing else I can offer a tip: if you get crashes as above try disabling NTFS and see what happens.

rac · Posted: Sun Sep 15, 2002 4:13 am Post subject:

If you're using gentoo-sources, could you see if the problem persists even with vanilla-sources?
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phong · Posted: Sun Sep 15, 2002 6:00 am Post subject:

In addition to what rac said, I'd like to mention that IIRC NTFS support in linux is isn't exactly 100% stable, even in read-only mode.
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lars_msh · n00b Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 50 Location: Airstrip One

Sorry, I'm having trouble reproducing this now. While I was in NT earlier (before I saw your replies) I moved/deleted quite a few files. The problem was somewhat intermittent anyway as I had managed to copy stuff off NTFS; but I'm 99% certain that all my otherwise unnacounted system freezes have been while accessing NTFS. I've had freezes from ALSA too, but had an NTFS-related freeze since I stopped using ALSA.

uname -a tells us this:
Linux frenzy 2.4.19-gentoo-r7 #4 SMP Sat Sep 14 13:19:52 BST 2002 i686 GenuineIntel

I compiled a new vanilla kernel but didn't bother installing it seeing as I can't make Gentoo crash anyhow. I suspect it's waiting for me to be working on something important... but I'll ditch my NTFS soon anyhow.