Apr
13
2007

NTFS Sucks

Hard disk woes and Hitter updates.

Friday, April 13, 2007 - 12:56:00 am
(Posted Under: Geek)
Today while trying to image some of Katie's old hard disks, mine, which we were imaging to went quite pear shaped. Firstly just not being able to boot windows (Unable to read disk). While this didn't seem good, I thought I'd be able to mount it in Linux, and at least recover my data - nope, given the partition was dirty, the Linux NTFS drivers wouldn't have a bar of it. Not shocking, I've experienced that before, with a NTFS formatted external USB disk, which Linux (rightly so) refuses to mount until it's been cleaned by a boot of Windows. Fine with a USB external HDD - kinda frustrating with a system disk (which refuses to boot Windows).

Through much pain and effort, I've finally got the disk working in another Windows XP machine (after several failed attempts and thinking the data was doomed (although I could see the drive seemed to work and the contents was there when I looked at /dev/hdb in Linux, I had no way to read/fix the actual file system), at least to the point where I can backup the data that I need. Who knows, it might just work when I put it back into the host computer (which I'm in no rush to do before everything is backed up). Once the scandisk (XP) finally worked, I saw what could have potentially been the issue - a whole slew of split image files from Acronis - at 4.57kb each. Which immediately it dawned on me that the problem was probably giving acronis a split size in bytes (4500), when I thought it would inteprete it as megabytes. Certainly explains why imaging a 6GB disk took over 20 hours and didn't even get half way through. How slow it was seemed unbelievable, but now I see why.

Who knows if that's what fried the disk. Or if it's going to work when I put it back in the machine. It'd be nice to think it would.

While working on fixing that disaster today, I have a bit of a play around with my hitter code, and was successful in something I've wanted to get working for a while - have the web interface only show hits of songs from my music share. I tried to get this working a while ago, and kinda achieved it, however it blew the load time of the page way out, and apache's memory usage went through the roof. Which I'd thought was a memory leak in either mysqld or PHP. It's something I've revisited a couple of times, and searched many bug reports trying to find out why. As it turns out, it was just me sucking at SQL joins! Once I got that right, it worked flawlessly, and page load times were as quick, if not quicker as when selecting plays no matter where the song is located. Horrah, a little success in the day, which until a few hours ago has been quite dismall.

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