NTFS copying issue in Linux
Posted in Linux on February 20th, 2010Because of my personal recurrence of this problem I’ve decided to publish this post for your and mine knowledge/memory. This issue shows up when you want to copy a bigger file from native Linux filesystem to Microsoft one (NTFS) using of course ntfs-3g. This task is not succeeding, estimated time is growing up without end and copy process is jammed in about 10%.
I’ve solved such problem in the past, then forgot about this whole case, but unfortunatelly few weeks ago I encountered it again. Wrongly I was blaming ntfs-3g (recent update?), but different mounting options didn’t helped at all.
Suddenly I was enligthened! The NTFS partitions must be in very fragmented state, that’s why ntfs-3g was not able to manage this copy process. My solution is to run Windows, remove unwanted files from NTFS part. and perform disk defragmentation using built-in Microsoft app (takes too long) or much faster Diskkeeper.
Now you can copy files from Linux to Windows normally.
