Mount NTFS Spanned Volume in Linux

[Patrick Wallek]

I am running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 on a DL380 G5.

I have a need to mount a Windows 2000 NTFS spanned volume on the SLES server. The volume I need is made up of 6 approx. 1.8 TB LUNs. Each disk is set as Dynamic in Windows. These 6 disks were then combined into the single spanned volume.

Linux sees each LUN as an SFS file system, which is what Linux interprets dynamic disks as, if I understand correctly.

The main question -- Is there a way in Linux to mount this Windows spanned volume?

Note -- I have looked at, and actually purchased, the Paragon Software NTFS for Linux software. This software is supposed to be able to do what I require, but it is not compiling on SLES 10 SP2. Their support says it will be 2 weeks before they can get me a version that works on SLES.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Patrick,

To bad you aren't using Ubuntu, I've got rw mount on a bunch of NFS filesystems on the v ery box I'm working on.

This is something you might be able to get working with open source alternatives.

SUSE is not a Distro I work with a lot but here are a few stories with instructions that might work for you.

http://akhrikas.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/how-to-mounting-ntfs-partition-in-open-suse-102/

Worth a read:
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/suse-linux-help/64710-mounting-ntfs-suse-10-a.html

When you say: NTFS spanned volume, do you mean Distributed File System?

Note it might work better, but not faster to use the Unix tools for Windows and do a simple NFS export or even Samba and cifsmount.

There are a few options here.

SEP

[Patrick Wallek]

Hi SEP,

I'll have a read through those articles and see if there's anything I can use.

>>When you say: NTFS spanned volume, do you mean Distributed File System

I don't think so. To create the volume in W2K: the LUNs were presented from the array to the server, the disks were marked as Dynamic in Windows, when the volume was created I chose "Spanned volume" and select the disks/Luns that I wanted to be a part of that. The resulting volume was then formatted as NTFS. Essentially it is concatenating all the disks into a single large volume that is then mounted.

NFS or CIFS could be an option, but I really need to mount this on the Linux server natively. The server that is running Windows is destined for other things and I can't keep it around very long.

[Steven E. Protter]

Okay, straight NTFS mount situation.

After the joy of doing it in Ubuntu, I'm surprised the feature is not built into SUSE.

I don't see why a third party product to do this:

http://en.opensuse.org/NTFS#Mounting_NTFS_Partition

If you need only to see your files, then you don't need to do anything as NTFS read only access is enabled in all versions of SUSE Linux / openSUSE by default.

For read/write you should add this repositories:

zypper sa http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/filesystems/openSUSE_10.2/ Filesystems

SLES should be able to do this.

Run a few tests please and report results.

SEP

[Patrick Wallek]

SLES can mount normal BASIC NTFS disks. It cannot deal with DYNAMIC SPANNED NTFS volumes.

As I said above, SLES sees the disks that are part of the dynamic spanned volumes as SFS file systems and NOT normal NTFS file systems.

[Steven E. Protter]

Okay then,

Now that I've actually figured out what dynamic spanned ntfs is....

A NTFS volume spanned over two disks.

The only product that seems capable of doing the job is the one you are waiting on.

The open source community has not come up with an alternative that I can find, which is why your vendor can get away with charging money for this software.

You only option until you receive the software you are waiting for is Samba or NFS.

I gave it a good go and found nothing.

Hanging my head in shame. I call myself a Linux geek.

SEP

[Patrick Wallek]

Well nuts!!!!! I was hoping someone had done this.

I'll leave this open for a while longer to see if anyone else comes up with anything.