I am having issues mounting a 3 TB drive via ntfs-3g. The drive is fine and it auto mounts without issue on a Ubuntu Desktop. When trying to mount it on my CentOS servers (5.x and 6.4) (I first use tgtd) I run into the following issues.

root@mybox:[~] # ntfs-3g -o ro /dev/sde1 /tmp/a/
NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sde1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sde1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

Here is a little information encase any of it helps;

iscsi: registered transport (bnx2i)
iscsi: registered transport (be2iscsi)
scsi8 : iSCSI Initiator over TCP/IP
scsi 8:0:0:0: RAID IET Controller 0001 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
scsi 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 12
scsi 8:0:0:1: Direct-Access WD My Book 1140 1019 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sd 8:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
sd 8:0:0:1: [sde] 5860466688 512-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB)
sd 8:0:0:1: [sde] Write Protect is off
sd 8:0:0:1: [sde] Mode Sense: 49 00 00 08
sd 8:0:0:1: [sde] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
sde: sde1
sd 8:0:0:1: [sde] Attached SCSI disk
fuse init (API version 7.13)

root@mybox:[~] # fdisk -l /dev/sde1

Disk /dev/sde1: 375.1 GB, 375069736960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 45599 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe5e5e5e5

root@mybox:[~] # fdisk -l /dev/sde

Disk /dev/sde: 3000.6 GB, 3000558944256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364797 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00028375

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sde1 1 45600 366279040 7 HPFS/NTFS

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hi,


3TB disks generally use 4K sectors. What is the ntfs-3g version you are using on CentOS ? Versions older than 2012 ones were buggy for 4K sectors disks.

This is unusual (5860466688 does not hold on 32 bits). What kind of partitioning are you using (GPT ?), is this supported by CentOS ?

The partition is probably formatted for 512 bytes per sector, this would be inefficient for a 4K sectored disk, even though it may appear to be ok on Ubuntu. How did you format this partition ?

Check your drive specifications for sector size, and whether the partitioning used is supported by CentOS.

Regards

Jean-Pierre

I did a some research and testing. I found that it's my kernel version, CentOS 5.x uses 2.6.18 and below, but at least Linux Kernel 2.6.32 (I tested on 2.6.32) or maybe even works with 2.6.31 is needed to support drives with 4k sectors. I tried it on two CentOS 6 machines using ntfs-3g and it worked without any hiccups.