Question Problem with Advanced Format Disks

[itrushton]

I have a bit of an issue!

I have a win10 pc running multiple 8, 12 and 14tb seagate disks. Most of these are in two spanned volumes - one with my large collection of dvd/Blu-ray discs encoded and the other with my collection of vinyl/cds/minidiscs in flac. Needless to say I’d rather not lose anything!

I recently booted up in Ubuntu as I wish to dual boot on the same of. However, none of the volumes are visible; all the discs report as sectors not being aligned as well as partitions out of order.

From what I understand, somehow windows has managed to stuff the sector alignment up! But how can I fix so I can access these spanned volumes in Ubuntu as well as windows - obviously without losing the data! If it makes any difference! The spanned volumes are formatted NTFS, with 16k cluster size due to being about 40tb and 30tb!

Thanks!

 

[fzabkar]

Linux has mdadm for software RAID. Perhaps you could use it for spanned volumes as well, although I can't imagine this would be straightforward.

Edit:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dynamic_disks

"Install the libldm package. Once installed, ldmtool can be used to query and mount dynamic disks."

 

[USAFRet]

Needless to say I’d rather not lose anything!

Where was the actual backup for this data?

 

[BFG-9000]

Software FakeRAID is not officially supported by Ubuntu so is not recommended. But if you insist here's a guide on how to mdadm a JBOD array. Note that they only suggest this as a way to retrieve/recover files, not for normal usage so it may not be too reliable.

 

[USAFRet]

Most of these are in two spanned volumes

Spanned drives in Windows Storage Spaces?

 

[BFG-9000]

Windows Storage Spaces is ReFS so you'd need the commercial ReFS driver from Paragon.

 

[itrushton]

Thanks for the quick reply. I can try that for spanned volumes but I suspect I’ll still have the 4k alignment error? The drives were partitioned and formatted in windows 10 so don’t know why they would be out of alignment in the first place

 

[itrushton]

Spanned drives in Windows Storage Spaces?

I didn’t use storage spaces, I just did through disk management, converted to dynamic discs, and extended the volumes using the free space as I added additional discs. So I guess they are simple volumes?

 

[itrushton]

Where was the actual backup for this data?

It’s a home pc, so finding a backup solution for 70tb is not easy…

 

[USAFRet]

It’s a home pc, so finding a backup solution for 70tb is not easy…

Size of the data is irrelevant.

My NAS has 90TB space in or attached.

ALL storage devices are subject to fail at any moment.
Sometimes, quite suddenly.

Or, the software controller subsystem fails.

Whichever, anything you do not wish to lose needs to be backed up.
Period.

 

[itrushton]

I’m well aware of the risks of data loss, that’s a given.

But this is not a question about data loss, it’s a question about accessing drives across operating systems

 

[USAFRet]

I’m well aware of the risks of data loss, that’s a given.

But this is not a question about data loss, it’s a question about accessing drives across operating systems

I'm pretty sure a spanned volume set up in Windows is not viable in a Linux OS.