Chkdsk errors. using ntfs external USB drives in Kubuntu

[millusions]

dear all,

having problems with usb ntfs mounts in Kubuntu,

external disk in a USB2 enclosure mounted through fstab as ntfs,
copy/paste:
UUID=FAB67651B6760DFF /mnt/thevault ntfs-3g defaults,noauto,rw,noatime 0 0 (i do remember someone saying that rw is obsolete with defaults, but havent changed it)

it is always manually mounted and unmounted before removal. Last time I plugged it in on my laptop some large files were showing 0 file size, so i just booted Window$ 7 and did a chkdsk,
oh thats retarded, i cant even copy/paste the output of chkdsk (windows is so retarded),
anyway, chkdsk deleted the files which were showing up as 0 size, no biggy, just some files i copied there to take over to friends.

but this whole episode suggests to me that this media is very unreliable, i use this disk maybe 3 times a week if that.
what am I doing wrong?
how can i avoid file system corruption?
i would format it ext4 and leave a small ntfs partition but i get annoyed when a removable drive has more than one partition (sorry).

thanks for reading my post

[SteveRiley]

How big is the drive? If you need to share it with Windows, FAT32 is likely to be a better cross-platform file system than NTFS.

[millusions]

500GB
and one other similar (usb3) 640GB,

is that the only option?
are you saying with ntfs this is ,.. how to say... normal?

[SteveRiley]

I'm of the opinion that trying to use NTFS routinely in Linux is a lost cause. Windows and Linux file permissions don't have a direct one-to-one mapping, and if the filesystem develops errors, ntfs-3g can't fix them -- you'll always need to boot windows to run chkdsk. FAT32 eliminates both of these concerns. If you have files larger than 4 GiB, then consider exFAT. You'll need to install exfat-fuse and exfat-utils.

[millusions]

thanks for the explanation, i'll go with fat32

[Rod J]

I also use a USB external hard drive (1Tb NTFS formatted) as a backup device. I was doubtful about leaving it as NTFS but so far, no problems.

However, being somewhat cautious, I don't just unmount it but also execute this after the unmount:
"udisks --detach /dev/sdc1"

The udisks tool actually powers down the drive making it safer to remove it (I believe). This emulates Windows behaviour.

I recently went a little further and wrote a script to handle this as I had added another internal hard drive and the external drive changed its identifier. If you want to use the script just change "Expansion Drive" to whatever your external drives label is. The script first unmounts the drive and then powers it down. No doubt the script could be improved but it does what I want currently.

#!/bin/sh

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Safely unmount and detach the external Seagate HDD "Expansion Drive"
#
# This script detects which "dev" device matches the label "Expansion Drive" when the drive is mounted.
# I needed to make the detection automatic because my one line command that did the unmount/detach before
# wasn't working correctly after I added another internal HDD recently.
#
# 27-06-2014 v1.0
#+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

EXP_DRIVE_DEV=`df | grep "Expansion Drive" | cut -b 1-8`

echo Unmounting Expansion Drive partition "$EXP_DRIVE_DEV"1

udisks --unmount "$EXP_DRIVE_DEV"1


if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
	sleep 3
	echo Unmounted successfully ... now powering down/detaching Expansion Drive "$EXP_DRIVE_DEV"
	udisks --detach "$EXP_DRIVE_DEV"
	echo Please wait until the drive light goes out and then remove the USB cable.
else
	echo *** Error: Unmounting failed! Please check busy status of drive and then try again! ***
fi

[SteveRiley]

Another option is to install an Ext2 driver under Windows, I use Ext2Fsd and it just works.

True, but with some loss of portability. You might find yourself at some other Windows computer and unable to install drivers. For example, a public workstation or a machine at a conference.