Question Mounting spanned Windows volumes on AFS drives in Linux ?

[itrushton]

I am attempting to access a number of spanned Windows volumes that are using AFS drives (Seagate Exos 12-16tb drives) on Ubuntu. However, they aren’t mounting. When I check I get the warning “The partition does not start on the physical sector boundary ” and also get the error that partitions are not in the correct order.

These drives work fine in Windows - they were formatted and created in Windows 10/11 Disk Management and formatted NTFS. The only special part is that due to the size of the spanned volumes they are formatted in 16k block size.

All info seen so far suggests realigning partitions and reformatting - which I can’t do. Can anyone offer any solutions ?

 

[Murissokah]

Spanned volumes in Windows rely on LDM / Storage Spaces, which are not natively supported by linux. You can use ldmtool to read the ldm data and create device-mapper entries which will allow you to mount the spanned volume.

Details about how spanned volumes work:

Basic and Dynamic Disks - Win32 apps

Describes two disk storage types and discusses partition styles.

learn.microsoft.com

Details on how to mount ldm partition with ldmtool

Windows Spanned Disks (LDM) restoration with Linux?

Is it possible to read Windows 2008 LDM partitions in Linux? We have five 512GB LUNS exported through ISCSI to a dead Windows 2008 and this box doesn't want them anymore. Windows believes they ar...

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