New external drive problem

[jctl2]

I just replaced the old ext3 formatted drive attached to my WDTV-Plus with a larger and newer external HDD. It appeared to connect well and I could play files off of it, but I've been having some connection problems when transferring files and torrenting. Files show that they have transferred or downloaded, but they have errors. I'm troubleshooting -- is it possible that something in my setup through wdlxtv is at fault? I haven't changed the old settings from when I was using my old drive, so could something be causing these problems?

[mad_ady]

What's the filesystem? NTFS can cause problems in case it wasn't powered off cleanly. Try using Ext3 with journal

[jctl2]

I would like to use NTFS, if possible -- my old ext3 drive was giving me problems, I could never delete files from it properly, so it got full very fast. I don't use the kind of tools or commands that are recommended on this forum for ext3 drives at all, so I always felt like I couldn't fix any problems with that drive. Is there anything else I can try first?

[mad_ady]

Fat32 is well supported if you can live with the "no file over 4GB" limitation. Otherwise, expect problems when booting with NTFS, especially after power outages. You may need to remove it and scan it in a windows PC before retrying.

Regarding file management on ext3 drives - if you don't want to use the command-line tools (or file managers such as midnight commander), you can do a basic job of deleting/renaming files with a FTP/SFTP client (e.g. Filezilla/WinSCP).

[jctl2]

Thank you for the help/advice -- I really appreciate it. One more quick question -- when I set up my old ext3 drive many years ago, I set up two partitions so the drive would mount and run various programs. If I just want to use this drive for file storage, do I need to to that, or can I set up a single ext3 partition and transfer/save files to it?

Thanks again

[mad_ady]

One partition is enough