[colug-432] NTFS on CentOS 6: Check Hardware; Clone Old Partition

[jep200404 at columbus.rr.com]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:24:25 -0500, Joshua Kramer <joskra42.list at gmail.com> wrote:

> Has anyone had issues with NTFS support on CentOS 6?
> 
> I have a 320G USB disk. 

> I attempted to create one partition FAT32, and one partition NTFS.  This
> setup is visible by both OS's.  However, when writing files to the NTFS
> partition, CentOS complains with generic I/O errors.

Although I suspect software more than hardware for your woes, 
when one hears of I/O errors, it would be prudent to check the 
health of that drive with S.M.A.R.T., such as with 
smartctl -a /dev/[sh]d[a-f]. 
Also, study your log files. 

Let's hope your USB drive is not made by Seagate, 
with its proprietary non-S.M.A.R.T. friendly stuff. 

> I have another USB disk, it is an older 40G IDE model, formatted NTFS.
> CentOS shows no I/O errors writing to this disk.

An ugly workaround would be to clone that partition with dd, 
then resize as desired. If that works, you might want to 
keep an additional clone with all the files deleted 
and the partition size minimized, to use a seed for 
other later fun. For mo' fun check out alternate data 
streams in NTFS. 

Nonetheless, check out the health of your hard drive. 
You should know that anyway.