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Why no NTFS? |
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#1 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 15
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Why no NTFS?
You guys were very helpful back in January when I was setting up Freesat and I'm grateful for that. Since then all has run smoothly (touch wood) until today when I wanted to transfer a film to my PC.
The HDD will only talk to devices which are formatted to either FAT16/32 or EXT 2/3. I've never heard of EXT 32, my mobile hard drive will only do NTFS and my mem stick will do Fat32 but is only 1Gb. Is there the likelihood of an upgrade which will address NTFS or does it mean I have to buy a larger mem stick? Any thoughts or comments would be gratefully received. |
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#2 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 722
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No chance (well, very little chance) of NTFS being supported on the HDR.
NTFS is a propriety Microsoft 'trade secret'. If Humax were to use it they'd have to pay Microsoft a load of wonga, which I'd assume they aren't prepared to do. Your mobile hard drive will do Ext 3. You just need to format it to this format. Google for tools to format a drive to Ext 3 under Windows. It's not really very user friendly. |
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#3 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Redditch Worcs
Posts: 17,289
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Quote:
You guys were very helpful back in January when I was setting up Freesat and I'm grateful for that. Since then all has run smoothly (touch wood) until today when I wanted to transfer a film to my PC.
The HDD will only talk to devices which are formatted to either FAT16/32 or EXT 2/3. I've never heard of EXT 32, my mobile hard drive will only do NTFS and my mem stick will do Fat32 but is only 1Gb. Is there the likelihood of an upgrade which will address NTFS or does it mean I have to buy a larger mem stick? Any thoughts or comments would be gratefully received. http://www.avforums.com/forums/frees...ml#post9719973 |
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#4 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 15
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Thanks guys, looks like Slax is the way to go.
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#5 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Brackley, UK
Posts: 16,657
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Writing an NTFS driver doesn't have to violate Microsoft intellectual copyright. I wrote a reader as part of our data recovery tools many years ago. The problem is that it's a more complicated file system than most. We actually ended up using the engine as a back-end to other drivers because NTFS is a superset of pretty much anything else.
It's a bit harder still to write a writeable NTFS driver but there wouldn't be much point in that anyway. NTFS is a poor file system choice for streaming data to. It's not brilliant for streaming data from either but on a modern disk it'll do the job. My server is able to record one stream and playback another but it isn't happy about it. I suppose you could write your driver to be more picky about allocation strategies but overall it's just not designed for that task. |
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#6 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Luxembourg
Posts: 340
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I may be reading this wrong but does this mean that when the ethernet port is enabled on the HDR it will not be possible to copy files to a PC with a drive formatted in NTFS?
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#7 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 722
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Quote:
I may be reading this wrong but does this mean that when the ethernet port is enabled on the HDR it will not be possible to copy files to a PC with a drive formatted in NTFS?
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#8 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 1
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Quote:
I may be reading this wrong but does this mean that when the ethernet port is enabled on the HDR it will not be possible to copy files to a PC with a drive formatted in NTFS?
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#9 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: North Derbyshire
Posts: 41,783
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Quote:
I may be reading this wrong but does this mean that when the ethernet port is enabled on the HDR it will not be possible to copy files to a PC with a drive formatted in NTFS?
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#10 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Oct 2004
Posts: 821
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Dont worry yourselves about ethernet and NTFS - if they enable it for file transfer it will be FTP as per their other products and it won't care what your disk format is.
Go on Humax TURN FTP BACK ON. |
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#11 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: The Sticks
Posts: 3,720
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All I want them to do is make the HDR access SMB shares
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#12 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Brackley, UK
Posts: 16,657
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Quote:
I may be reading this wrong but does this mean that when the ethernet port is enabled on the HDR it will not be possible to copy files to a PC with a drive formatted in NTFS?
![]() File system formats only dictate how and where the the bytes are stored on the disk. They have the same values in the same sequence regardless of file system. All of this is irrelevant to network communication. How a computer gets the data from its disk doesn't matter. File system support is simply a none issue the same way that you don't need to know how a wharehouse stores things in order to have your goods delivered. What matters is how the computers exchange the data across the network and that's a whole other area. As another poster suggested they might use FTP. That's an old standard that's well understood. It would be more convenient though if they supported NetBIOS or SMB. That would allow us to just plug the box into a network and browse folders. FTP is all well and good but a bit techie and inconvenient. |
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#13 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 15
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Thanks for the extra information but one more question.
If I format my mobile HDD to EXT 3 so it can be seen by the Humax will the resulting file be able to be seen by either Vista Ultimate or Home on my PC and laptop? And subsequently will a file in EXT 3 be readable by Nero Burn? A further question - if I format my mobile drive to EXT3 will I be able to format it back to NTFS later on if I want/need to? Thanks. |
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#14 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Luxembourg
Posts: 340
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Quote:
You're rather assuming it will be a fully implemented ethernet port, and not just a connection for iPlayer.
I don't recall if FTP transfer is possible with the iCord?
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#15 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: S6 1SW WTID UTO FTB
Posts: 6,326
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My 250GB 2.5inch HDD is formatted with FAT 32 using Fat32Formatter http://tokiwa.qee.jp/EN/Fat32Formatter/
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#16 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Brackley, UK
Posts: 16,657
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Quote:
Thanks for the extra information but one more question.
If I format my mobile HDD to EXT 3 so it can be seen by the Humax will the resulting file be able to be seen by either Vista Ultimate or Home on my PC and laptop? It's not because the file has changed however - it hasn't. It's because Windows out of the box doesn't support EXT3 and therefore doesn't know how to find the file. Quote:
And subsequently will a file in EXT 3 be readable by Nero Burn?
I'm not sure about the answer to that. I suspect you are still confused about what file systems are.I'll try and reiterate:A file system is just an indexing system. It's a method used by the computer to find the file. The file itself remains unchanged. Given that Nero 3 is a Windows application it would be reliant upon Windows to know how to find the file on the disk. Unless you can find an Ext 3 driver for Windows it cannot find the file and therefore cannot make it available to Nero 3. There are a couple of such drivers around but I use one I wrote so I can't comment on how good they are. File systems drivers operate at a very low level below the crash protection built into Windows. Be aware that if they go wrong they will likely blue-screen your system. |
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#17 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Hawkwell, Essex
Posts: 2,186
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Quote:
Thanks for the extra information but one more question.
If I format my mobile HDD to EXT 3 so it can be seen by the Humax will the resulting file be able to be seen by either Vista Ultimate or Home on my PC and laptop? And subsequently will a file in EXT 3 be readable by Nero Burn? A further question - if I format my mobile drive to EXT3 will I be able to format it back to NTFS later on if I want/need to? Thanks. Just keep this CD, and when you want to transfer a file to your PC or Laptop, boot up with the Slax CD, transfer the file from USB HDD to PC/Laptop HDD using Slax (very user friendly and very Windows like). Once you've got it on your PC/Laptop HDD, reboot without the CD into Windows, and you can then do what you like with it. And, yes, you can reformat back to NTFS later if you really want to. Rgds. Les. |
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#18 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: North Derbyshire
Posts: 41,783
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Quote:
Well it would be daft not to but yes I was assuming
![]() The ethernet port is there for iPlayer, not to make it a full network device - which would make it a FAR more interesting receiver. Still who knows, interesting times ahead
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#19 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 69
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Quote:
Thanks for the extra information but one more question.
If I format my mobile HDD to EXT 3 so it can be seen by the Humax will the resulting file be able to be seen by either Vista Ultimate or Home on my PC and laptop? And subsequently will a file in EXT 3 be readable by Nero Burn? Thanks. The disk drive will need to be connected back up to a PC running Linux and unmounted properly. It will then be readable by any Windows machine running Ext2fs. Again, remember to unmount the drive when removing it from the Windows PC. |
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#20 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Redditch Worcs
Posts: 17,289
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Quote:
Thanks for the extra information but one more question.
If I format my mobile HDD to EXT 3 so it can be seen by the Humax will the resulting file be able to be seen by either Vista Ultimate or Home on my PC and laptop? And subsequently will a file in EXT 3 be readable by Nero Burn? A further question - if I format my mobile drive to EXT3 will I be able to format it back to NTFS later on if I want/need to? Thanks. http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs There is a possible fly in the ointment though, when I tried to mount the drive under windows it had to be unmounted first by a linux booted pc. (The hdr does not unmount the drive). I boot my laptop with a slax boot CD and simply drag the files to a ntfs volume (linux can read/write ntfs). Yes you can reformat your drive back to ntfs, you may however need to use fdisk to remove the primary partition. |
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#21 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 15
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Quote:
I suspect you are still confused about what file systems are.
Thanks for your reply.Quote:
If you are going to format your drive to ext3, you will likely use a "Live" linux distro like Slax which can run from the CD that you burn, to do this.
Just keep this CD, and when you want to transfer a file to your PC or Laptop, boot up with the Slax CD, transfer the file from USB HDD to PC/Laptop HDD using Slax (very user friendly and very Windows like). Once you've got it on your PC/Laptop HDD, reboot without the CD into Windows, and you can then do what you like with it. And, yes, you can reformat back to NTFS later if you really want to. Rgds. Les. Quote:
Yes. You can read the disk using Windows by using a free utility called Ext2fs. Just Google to find it. It allows Windows Vista and other variants to read ext2 and ext3 formatted disk drives and manipulate files just like any other device. The only thing you have to watch is unplugging devices that are formatted in Ext3 and powered through the USB. The Humax doesn't dismount them properly. If you plug a device that is in that 'not unmounted properly' state into the Windows machine, you will get a message saying the disk needs to be formatted before use.
The disk drive will need to be connected back up to a PC running Linux and unmounted properly. It will then be readable by any Windows machine running Ext2fs. Again, remember to unmount the drive when removing it from the Windows PC. Quote:
To read EXT3 under windows you need a EXT2/3 driver
http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs There is a possible fly in the ointment though, when I tried to mount the drive under windows it had to be unmounted first by a linux booted pc. (The hdr does not unmount the drive). I boot my laptop with a slax boot CD and simply drag the files to a ntfs volume (linux can read/write ntfs). Yes you can reformat your drive back to ntfs, you may however need to use fdisk to remove the primary partition. There's been lots of interesting stuff here - again thanks to all who replied. |
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#22 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Redditch Worcs
Posts: 17,289
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Quote:
Would it be daft not to?, is it any dafter than crippling RGB from the SCART socket for HD programmes?.
The ethernet port is there for iPlayer, not to make it a full network device - which would make it a FAR more interesting receiver. Still who knows, interesting times ahead ![]() |
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#23 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Hawkwell, Essex
Posts: 2,186
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Quote:
Nigel that reminded me. Reading Danielle's blog re change of BBC HD to copy once she says that may also turn on RGB from the scart. Has anyone tested this on the hdr ?
Rgds. Les. |
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#24 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Feb 2009
Posts: 100
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Regarding this NTFS Microsoft "cost" not being viable for Humax. just to point out that I have a cheap Comag SL100HD with a USB pvr connection which works with NTFS. All that stuff with Ext3 etc; and using Linux is an unneccessary complication and is a blot to the otherwise excellent Humax PVR.
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#25 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Brackley, UK
Posts: 16,657
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The 'cost' is relative.
The thing is anyone who knows their way around a compiler and can read Wikipedia can knock up a FATx driver. Ext 3 is available presumably because the Humax runs Linux and it comes for free. NTFS OTOH needs them to write a complicated driver - NTFS is not a simple file system even when you only want to read from it. A lot of Linux distros do have NTFS support but you'll note that most of them only had read support to start with. Tbh I don't know if/why such a driver is available on every Linux install. A quick look at the web suggests there's a commercial driver available (costly) or a handful of okay-probably-drivers knocked up by enthusiasts. The issue with NTFS is that there's not a huge amount of documentation for it. Certainly none produced by Microsoft. The FS is a very open-ended FS. Each file record for instance consists of multiple attributes and each attribute has a 32 bit value to identify it and another for its length. I doubt anyone outside of the MS NTFS team knows exactly what all the attributes mean. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs Bottom line:Supporting NTFS outside of Windows is not a trivial task. The legality of it is probably unimportant compared to the development time involved. Remember - they'd have to be sure it wrote correctly or lay themselves open to tirades of customers angry at Humax for trashing their disks. |
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Thanks for your reply.