I have a bunch of NTFS externals set up as samba shares on Linux Mint and they'll work just perfectly, but after a while they will stop functioning and the folders will be empty. It fixes itself if I restart my computer but only for a little while. This happens whether i access them locally or over the network through samba.

I don't want to set the as ext3/4 because I need to access on windows from time to time (i'm dual booting) and I don't want to set them as fat32 because they I have files over the filesize limit on there.

anyone else have this problem and know a solution? i really don't want to reformat to another filesystem because ntfs would be perfect if this problem was fixed.

i cded to a folder and started playing a video file and it played for about 10 seconds and then mplayer stopped with the message saying

even though it wasn't the whole file. as i've said restarted will fix the problem for a little bit but then it will happen again

Looks like your ntfs drivers are failing...

you might want to try looking in /var/log/messages around the time your ntfs goes bad. you may also try doing a filesystem check on the ntfs partitions.

Might also be something connected to the permissions / owners. Please check them when the stoppage occurs and post the results here.

i actually may have found the problem. i was running 3 2tb hard drives, a 1 terabyte hard drive and a 3 terabyte hard drive, and they were all plugged into the back of my pc. i split it up a bit and plugged some of them into the front and some of them into the back so as to split up the load, and i haven't had a problem yet. i'm going to see how it goes for a while before i mark it solved though.

i know for sure it isn't the filesystems. i just went through a 2 week long process of slow formatting all of them.

plus all the drives stop working at the same time, which makes me think it was just the the usb getting overloaded.