I have a 4TB HDD used for storing backups made by UrBackup server run on Ubuntu – but formatted as NTFS. (Ie, data was written by linux on NTFS drive). In windows Explorer and on Ubuntu it reports as being less than half full when asked about disk space. When trying to write any file to the drive: On Ubuntu, it acts full (can't remember the exact error message, but it's something about being full), and on Windows, it gives error "Error 0x8007012E: The volume is too fragmented to complete this operation." Windows' "Optimize Drives" dialog says "last analyzed or optimized: Never run" and "Current status: Optimization not available" – ie Windows won't let me defrag it. When using windows "chkdsk /f" it never completes — at least, it seemed to be stuck in a loop, so I gave up on it and closed it. HWiNFO64 reports healthy. CrystalDiskInfo reports healthy. WinDirStat says there is over 8TB of data stored (drive is only 4TB), so I'm guessing there must be window's version of Hard Links present. (Not that hard links are bad, it's just a data point).
After collecting all this information, I'm not sure what to do next: I just want to understand what is going on with this drive.
TL;DR: HDD acts full (I can't write any new data) but reports as half full. Is it a bad drive? What tool can I use to figure this out? I want to be able to store more data on it.
Best Answer
Your file system is corrupted - save your data and reformat the disk. Check well the correctness of the saved data.
The problem that
chkdsknever completes might be because the corruption is too profound.The fact that WinDirStat finds double the data than is the capacity of the disk, is probably explained by crossed file-chains, so that the same data is counted twice (or more).
HWiNFO64 and CrystalDiskInfo report the disk as healthy, but you'd better keep on checking the SMART data in the future. If the problem repeats in the future, it might be healthier not to let this Linux product do extensive updates to an NTFS disk.