I have a problem using "diff DataVo2/ DataVol4/" in 64-bit ubuntu 14.04. The folder names refer to two NTFS volumes removed from a Windows 7 system and installed in my ubuntu box. Diff seems to properly compare the files and subfolder names but it will not terminate until I press ctrl-c. However, if I diff two subfolders it correctly compares and terminates. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal. But, I want to do a full recursive diff of the two mount points and pipe the output thru sed to filter part of the output. DataVol2 is a bit more than 1TB and DataVol4 is nearly 3TB. Unless diff terminates correctly, the pipe does not close and the sed script never invokes.

Can anyone shed some light on 1. What causes this problem? and, 2. How do I overcome it? There are actually 4 NTFS volumes mounted all of which are large. I merged two of them into a third and suspect that some of the data from the two did not copy to the third. I need to find what is missing before I reformat the source drives.

When you press CTRL-C, what is the final output? Is it the same every time, if you let it run for a really long time? It could be having trouble reading a particular directory/sector.

Have you run badblocks on both drives?
This is a read-only test. For a more thorough, but much slower test, add "n" before the "b" option.

Have you run chkdsk (from Windows) to see if filesystems are intact? Make sure to use the options that have it fix everything it finds.

My first suspicion is that it's choking because of undreadable data. If the above doesn't shed any light, we can check into other possible causes.

--Dane

I apologize for taking so long to respond to the thread... been busy with non-computer issues and trying to resolve side-issues with my Ubuntu based system that was taking an inordinate amount of time.

When I pressed ctrl-c, the diff app merely terminated as you'd expect... there was no output (this is running it without piping it to sed). The file system had been checked just before the drives were removed from the two Windows machines and no errors were discovered nor were any problems found from running "badblocks". As for possibly "choking on unreadable blocks", all the directories and files had been completely read from during the process of merging the data from one volume to the other so I don't think there were any bad blocks at that time.

I have marked this question as "resolved", but that state is only in my mind... maybe not entirely appropriate for other users. I have decided to abandon my current plan to use Ubuntu 14.04 to host my VMware VM's and revert to Windows 7 as the host. I don't have enough spare time to continue to resolve all the issues I have uncovered at this time... maybe I'll try again after a future release becomes available. I think Ubuntu currently contains too many "unfinished or obsolete" component tools and is deficient in quality documentation. Lest someone reading this thinks I make this charge unfairly from an uninformed point of view, let me just say that I have been a software engineer (on many different hardware and software platforms) for 46 years and have analyzed/designed/coded/tested many large-scale systems for both the private enterprise and the federal government.

Thank you Dane for attempting to help solve my posted issue. I was able to determine that the disk merges resulted in all files/folders successfully merged to the target drive. Unfortunately, in trying to repartition/reformat the largest original source drive and copy all the merged data back to a native ext4 drive revealed too many new issues for me to cope sith comfortably. I'm thinking that after I've finished rebuilding my Win7 box I may attempt to repeat the Ubuntu project on one of the old Win7 boxes I've just freed up but using 13.10 instead. If I have better success with that I will update my results here.

Sorry it's been such a pain for you. I've found that Ubuntu is currently better suited for notebooks and other "end user" applications than for more heavy-duty stuff. Mint, paradoxically, has been a lot better for VMWare and administration stuff, of late. (I'm using Mint 17 MATE for desktop/server and Ubuntu for notebook.) Good luck, in any case!