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JamesHannah
Asked: 2012-11-07 04:32:53 +0800 CST

Can Windows read an unpartitioned NTFS volume? (Single large partition)

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So, for various reasons, I've ended up with a 45TB Single Linux Logical volume, without a partition table, formatted as NTFS containing 28TB of data (the Filesystem itself is 28TB).

The filesystem was created in Linux, and is mountable by Linux. The problem comes when I try and mount this within a KVM-based Windows VM on the same box. Windows does not see a 28TB filesystem, but a 1.8TB disk containing a few randomly sized unhelpful partitions.

Disk Management output showing Disk1 with randomly sized partitions

I presume this is because Windows is trying to read the first few bytes of the real NTFS filesystem data as a partition table.

I can see a few possible solutions to this problem, but can't work out how to actually execute any of them:

  • Have Windows read an unpartitioned disk (single volume) as a Filesystem?
  • Generate a partition table somehow on this Logical Volume without destroying the data that's held within the filesystem itself?
  • Somehow fake a partition table, pointing at the LVM volume and export this to the KVM guest (running in libvirt)

The current "partition table" as reported by parted is:

Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/chandos--dh-data: 48.0TB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop

Number  Start  End     Size    File system  Flags
 1      0.00B  48.0TB  48.0TB  ntfs
linux

3 Answers

  1. I had a similar problem where I accidentally imaged a partition rather than a disk. The images were being copied across the network, and I didn't have time to copy them again. They were, however, much smaller than 28TB, and I used a process that required a copy of the image to be made.

    The initial image was taken by using:

    dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/image.bin

    To add a partition table, without copying everything across the network, I copied just the MBR to a file.

    dd if=/dev/sda of=/mbr.bin bs=512 count=1

    Then, I prepended the mbr and copied in the data.

    fdisk -l /mbr.bin
# take the start position * units in bytes (ex start at 256 * units of 512 bytes = 131072 bytes)
truncate -s (disk size in bytes + number of above) /newfile.bin
dd if=/mbr.bin of=/newfile.bin
dd if=/image.bin of=/newfile.bin oflag=seek_bytes seek=(number from above)

    Once complete, /newfile.bin has the complete partion table + data.

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  2. Best Answer

    I've actually not found a good solution to this. Luckily there's another drive shelf handy with ~30TB of space which I can use to migrate to a newly partitioned volume. It'll take a long time but it should work.

    There was a suggestion that some clever stuff could be done with the Linux Device Mapper (creating a virtual device which maps a fake GPT partition table from a file, alongside the LVM logical volume), but I'll leave that for someone smarter to work out.

    Edit: Actually ended up writing up a solution to this here

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  3. disk with morethan 2TB need to use GPT partition table. for disk <2TB MBR is sufficient.

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