Windows / FreeNAS Interoperable Disk Formats?

Mr. B

Mr. B

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 23, 2008
Messages
327
I recently built a second box from spare parts with the intention of creating a FreeNAS box to get some HDs out of my main desktop to alleviate heat and noise. I successfully installed FreeNAS but was unable to mount a couple NTFS drives with data on them. I was unable to do so and in 'researching' I found it's practically impossible to get NTFS to work with just about any NAS solution.

I'm now left with having to find a FreeNAS alternative that supports NTFS (not much luck there) or reformatting my drives. I'm reluctant to do this because I want the option to pull the drives should I desire and put them back in a Windows box. I also have the issue of how to transfer data from an NTFS drive to UFS for example. Are there any disk formats that work with Freenas (Linux) and Windows XP? I would be ok with installing some special drivers/software if necessary.
 
Check out unRaid. Read up on the forums and browse the wiki and you should be able to find what you need.

I have a server up and running with unRaid and like it very much. There is an addon called unMenu that will allow you to mount the NTFS drives and share them on the network. Do some reading and you should be able to get it up and running.
 
FAT and FAT32 will work with FreeNAS for read/writes. However, it has been my own personal experience, that FreeNAS likes to stick with UFS or you could get a corrupted drive (it has happened to me before). It looks like there are tools for reading UFS from windows (http://ufs2tools.sourceforge.net/) but I don't see anything readily available the can write to UFS if need be.


oooh, that unRaid looks interesting. I may have to give that a spin.
 
Old Hippie said:
This is one of the reasons why Windows Home Server is so appealing.
Click to expand...

Personally after the unforgivable data corruption issue (unforgivable because this was a device to store the personal data of the entire house-hold) and microsoft's slow response to fix it made me very wary of home server. it made it seem to be very low on microsoft's priority list.

For a microsoft solution I would much rather use one of their "regular" (business oriented) server editions.
 
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