Tag Archives: ntfs

QNAP – Manually Mounting a Belligerent eSATA Drive Filesystem

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It seems I’m complaining about my oldest QNAP every other week. Arguably, given the sweat equity invested in these devices, I’d be better off just replacing it. But I persist nonetheless. Recently I had to evacuate the array again and replace a drive. No, I know I shouldn’t have to do that but … look, fine. Anyway, I had used a combination of eSATA docked HDDs, a Windows 7 HTPC and some USB drives (basically whatever had capacity) to copy the data off. When I had the NAS sorted, I started to copy data back. This all went fine until I got to the last SATA drive. I kept getting a message that the filesystem wasn’t recognised. Even though the NAS had created said NTFS filesystem for me. It was a bit weird.

qnap1

The solution, after a bit of searching, was to manually mount the filesystem and copy off the files. Here’s how to do it.

Firstly, you can identify the device via dmesg.

[150521.371058] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Seagate  ST2000DL003-9VT1 CC32 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[150521.377213] Check proc_name[ahci].
[150521.389517] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdza] 3907029168 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB)
[150521.396630] Check proc_name[ahci].
[150521.403685] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdza] Write Protect is off
[150521.409037] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdza] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[150521.409217] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg676 type 0
[150521.415783] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdza] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[150521.448217]  sdza: sdza1 sdza2 sdza3 sdza4
[150521.469368] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdza] Attached SCSI disk

Create a mount point on the NAS to mount the device to.

[~] # cd /mnt
[/mnt] # ls
HDA_ROOT/ HDB_ROOT/ HDC_ROOT/ HDD_ROOT/ HDE_ROOT/ HDF_ROOT/ QUPNP/    config/   ext/
[/mnt] # mkdir tmpmnt

Once that’s done, you can mount the device. In this case I’m using ntfs-3g as I know it’s a NTFS filesystem. If you’re using something else, like ext4, then the mount command will be different.

[/mnt] # ntfs-3g /dev/sdza3 /mnt/tmpmnt/
[/mnt] # cd /mnt/tmpmnt/
[/mnt/tmpmnt] # ls
movies/
[/mnt/tmpmnt] #

And you can then copy the files to where you need them to be. Note that while I said this was a problem with eSATA, it was really a problem with the filesystem, not the transport mechanism, as using USB didn’t work either.