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I am trying to copy 500+ GB's of data from an NTFS formatted HDD to a ext3 formatted one. I am doing so from within Windows 7 Pro 64.

At first I was using Ext2 Volume Manager to mount the ext3 drive.

But after copying all of the files and rebooting, I discovered that all of the files were missing from the target drive. The target drive had gone back to only containing the files that it had before the copy job.

After a bit of mucking around, I uninstalled Ext2 Volume Manager and replaced it with the 10-day trial version of Paragon ExtFS for Windows.

Unbelievably, the situation remains the same. Any files that are copied from the source to the target HDD are missing after reboot!

(I don't have a Linux PC available, but I also tried booting off of a Ubuntu 16.01 Live USB drive to carry out this task. But I found the copying speed, from both Unity and from the terminal, to be unbearably slow... <2MB/s.)

How is this even possible?! What am I doing wrong and what do I need to do to make this work?!

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    Did you run fsck -fjust to make sure?
    – Eugen Rieck
    Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 20:49
  • I'm copying the files in a W7 environment, so that isn't possible. I suppose I could run chkdsk though.
    – stevland
    Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 21:20

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Use ext2explore to move your data then unmount the drive before rebooting.

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    Thank you. I am experimenting with your suggesting right now. My mind is still blown that it should be necessary to unmount the disk though. I would have thought that, if the files were written, they are written. Perhaps that is why @Eugen Rieck recommended checking the file system above.
    – stevland
    Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 21:24
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    Unmounting the drive seems to be the trick... thank you @GAD3R.
    – stevland
    Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 21:49
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    I'm still really curious as to why unmounting before reboot is necessary. I suppose the file system is updated somehow to take note of the changes. I also find it odd that both Ext2 Volume Manager and ExtFS for Windows do not attempt to make it explicitly clear for newcomers like myself that this is necessary in (some? all?) cases. I told myself that my lost hours are because I didn't RTFM, but just now I've gone back and read all available documentation for both utilities—which amounts to almost nothing—and this scenario is not mentioned. Oh well.
    – stevland
    Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 22:10

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