The other day I wanted to shrink the ntfs drive I’m using as a file-disk on both win11 and manjaro to make place for a 10GB ext4 partition.
Tried gparted first, and that completely froze on me 30s in after starting the shrinking operation, I thought for sure the drive was gone. I could not shut down, or kill -9 gparted either so I was forced to reboot.
Mark my surprise that after a reboot, the drive worked perfectly.
I have everything backed up so I’m not particularly worried anyway tbh.
Retried with KDE Partition Manager and the same thing happens, but this time the program doesn’t freeze, it just prompted an error that “checking the disk” did not work. No more or longer error than that. Sadly I did not look through logs at the time and this was a few days ago.
I ended up booting into windows and just shrinking the hd there, no errors and done in 1min.
I did some checks on the drive from windows but it produces no errors.
Crystal-disk says the drive is completely healthy although VERY old.
Is there a way, like e2fsck on ext4, to do a deep analysis on a ntfs drive?
I tried ntfsfix that is referenced to in the Arch wiki - ntfs-3g
sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdb2
Mounting volume... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Checking the alternate boot sector... OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/sdb2 was processed successfully.
I have noticed small things that I with logic can pinpoint towards the drive, but no fatal error, just small things suddenly breaking and then working again.
The drive is freaking 8 years old, basically was on 24/7 for the first 6 years, never re-formated etc.
TBH I’m SUPER impressed with the western digital red line of hard drives!
The drive SHOULD be in it’s end life, but is there a way to “deep probe” it, even deeper than windows can since that doesn’t show any errors.
I know this is a far fetch, but maybe somebody has some advice here, if not, I already have a new drive ready to put in its place, but I HATE throwing away stuff that can still be used one way or another.
No matter what, the drive stays until it starts making “funny noices” (it has started, just VERY rarely), just want to make sure I stay ahead of it as far as possible.
Thanks in advance!