Windows 7 + NAS drive := major suckage

[tranglos]

OK, now this is really unpleasant. This is what happens when I copy certain files from a Win7 local drive (left) to an ntfs partition on a NAS drive (right):



Whenever a file contains characters such as curly quotes, angle quotes, bullet characters, subscript characters, em-dash etc., only the short 8.3 filename gets copied to the NAS drive. So a file named Abc „def”  – ghi « jklm.htm on the Win7 system becomes Abcde~6h.HTM on the NAS drive.

I only discovered this after setting up a backup regime in SyncBack Pro and testing the results with Beyond Compare. I thought it was a SyncBack issue, but it is not - the filenames get clobbered no matter how they are copied (TotalCommander, Explorer, etc.). I wouldn't sweat it (so much) if the troublesome characters just got dropped, but what happens is that meaningful filenames are replaced with gibberish as above.

And (of course) the problem did not occur when I was running XP, and nothing on the NAS drive changed since I installed 7 a week ago. Files that were previously copied onto the NAS drive (under XP) still show up fine, which tells me that 7 is actively interfering with the copy operations. And now my NAS drive is no longer useful for backup.

Why could this be happening? I've googled, but couldn't find anything relevant.

[Shades]

Maybe a strange thing to mention here, but bear with me:
Last week I tried to install a trial version of Microsoft's Exchange Server 2007 onto a trial version of their Windows Server 2008. After a day of continuous re-installing and encountering some error of files that could not be found in the cache, I found out that disabling IPv6 on your NIC works mysterious wonders.

After I did that, the installation went allright in one go.

To my understanding the networking client from 2008 is related to the networking client of Vista...and Win7's network client is either the same or based on the one from Vista.

A free executable from Microsoft: Microsoft Fix it 50444 will disable IPv6 in the registry. The registry changes are also explained, so you can execute them yourself if you do not want to use their fix.

You will then have to reboot to activate the new settings. If you check the Network interface properties after the reboot, you will notice that IPv6 has not disappeared and is still activated. This is not a sign that IPv6 is still enabled though. Check with the console and the command ‘ipconfig’ to see if IPv6 is really gone.

WARNING:
After disabling the IPv6 protocol and re-enabling the protocol with the appropriate executables it is very likely that your PC crashes in an unsolvable way, requiring a re-install of the complete PC. My test PC did.

[wr975]

Why could this be happening? I've googled, but couldn't find anything relevant.

-tranglos (August 22, 2010, 11:01 AM)

I don't think Win 7 is the problem, you NAS device probably is.

It would be good to know the name of your NAS device.

Also, did you check for a firmware update?

[tranglos]

I do think Win7 has something to do with it, because I did not have the problem under XP, only 2 weeks ago. The NAS drive is D-link DNS-323. What's even weirder, those clobbered filenames on the NAS are even more trouble than I thought: they cannot be renamed (read error). They can be copied back and deleted, but not renamed. The wonders!

The OS does make *some* difference at least, because in XP I could map it to a drive letter, but Windows didn't otherwise recognize or do anything about the drive. Win 7, by contrast, reports it as a NAS drive, gives it a special icon in Explorer, has a property sheet for it (though nothing about the locale) etc., so it seems to have special handling for these types of drives that XP didn't have.

I did upgrade the firmware and it seems to have helped, but this caused existing filenames to show up in wrong codepage until I reformatted the whole drive. I've had this drive for 3 years now and it seems to be reliable enough, but the transfer is darn slow, only about 10 MB per second. It'll take a day and night to put the backup back in place.

(But the firmware upgrade was a good thing - the new version finally turns off the fan when the drive is idling. Before it would only turn off the internal discs, but it's the fan that makes all the noise. The silence is welcome.)

[ljbirns]

I have had a WD  NAS ntfs drive for 2 1/2  yrs.  I run Win 7  home premium
I created a file named     Abc„def”  – ghi « jklm.htm  ( your file name example ) on my C: drive  and copied ( context menu ) to the NAS. 
It copied without a problem   
I have been using Win 7 for about a year  XP  before that. But I have had the NAS drive for over 2 years with both system without a problem 
I use GoodSync and also Cobian Backup without any problems

[4wd]

I do think Win7 has something to do with it, because I did not have the problem under XP, only 2 weeks ago. The NAS drive is D-link DNS-323. What's even weirder, those clobbered filenames on the NAS are even more trouble than I thought: they cannot be renamed (read error). They can be copied back and deleted, but not renamed. The wonders!

-tranglos (August 22, 2010, 05:57 PM)

Works fine here for my D-Link DNS-313.  I don't map the drive, just browse to it via Explorer, (not normally used), or ftp via DOpus, (my normal method of access).

Windows 7 + NAS drive := major suckage

Normally all files copied to the DNS-313 are done by SyncBackSE using SAMBA access but they can all be viewed as full filenames without any access problems.

Perhaps you should try disabling 8.3 names on NTFS partitions?  (One of the first things I do after a new install.)

Set HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation to 1 and then reboot as per information here.  (Take note of the warnings associated with the value - I've never had a problem but YMMV.)

[f0dder]

I've had trouble with Disable8dot3, but that was exclusively with 16bit applications (which was exclusively crappy old installers - using 16bit stubs even though the apps they were installing were 32bit). Since I now run 64bit and thus can't run 16bit apps anymore, no point in keeping 8dot3

Anyway, sounds like a weird problem - I do suspect that it's the NAS drive that has some quirks rather than Win7, but weird it certainly is. Tried running a chkdsk on the partition?

[4wd]

Anyway, sounds like a weird problem - I do suspect that it's the NAS drive that has some quirks rather than Win7, but weird it certainly is. Tried running a chkdsk on the partition?

-f0dder (August 23, 2010, 01:02 PM)

Good point, I just had 3 files on my DNS-313 that I couldn't modify/delete/update and it was because there was a disk error.  chkdsk fixed it but then I just reformatted it anyway.

@tranglos: Since it's affecting all methods of copying files perhaps the firmware update has reset something on the DNS-323, like character encoding:

I created a file named     Abc„def”  – ghi « jklm.htm  ( your file name example ) on my C: drive  and copied ( context menu ) to the NAS. 
It copied without a problem

-ljbirns (August 22, 2010, 06:58 PM)

Tried the same thing, it worked fine.

[wr975]

The NAS drive is D-link DNS-323.

-tranglos (August 22, 2010, 05:57 PM)

Hi,

the DNS-323 can't do NTFS. It's formatting the drive with EXT2.

I've the same NAS and no troubles with Win7x64. I even tried copying filenames with such ANSI symbols.

Perhaps this solves your problem?

If you are using firmware 1.04, by default the DNS-323 will support Unicode which is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world’s writing formats. However, if you were using an earlier version of firmware (1.03 or earlier) and have just upgraded to 1.04, Unicode will not be supported until you have reformatted the hard drives in your DNS-323. If you wish to store non-English character files but do not want to reformat your hard drives, you will need to change the Language setting of the device to ensure compatibility with those files.

How to change the language setting in DNS 323 (if you don't want to reformat)

I've had this drive for 3 years now and it seems to be reliable enough, but the transfer is darn slow, only about 10 MB per second

True, true... They sell it as "Gigabit" NAS but under best conditions it can't do more than 24 MB/sec (see facts sheet. It's written somewhere with tiny letters.). I'm getting around 20 MB/sec transfer speed. Of course, a *real* Gigabit NAS would be much, much, much more expensive, so it's kinda OK... but I don't like marketing lies.

If your network card supports it, activate Jumbo Frames (in your NAS and the network card settings). This will improve transfer speed greatly. (At least on my system.)

[f0dder]

Of course, a *real* Gigabit NAS would be much, much, much more expensive, so it's kinda OK... but I don't like marketing lies.

-wr975 (August 24, 2010, 04:22 AM)

It really shouldn't be - even not-so-über harddrives these days are way faster, and a Gigabit NIC costs next to nothing.

[wr975]

Researched a bit... many NAS system suffer from this problem, like Fantec MR-35DRN or ZyXEL NSA-220. Apparently it's not only the NIC, but also the chipset/CPU. Can't be compared with a desktop PC.

The Synology Disk Station DS209+ costs almost four times as much as the DNS 323, comes with a 800 Mhz CPU but still ... 40 MB/sec only.

Guess, on second thought, the DNS 323 is a good piece of hardware. (At least for users like me, who don't know Linux, so they could do a cheap and fast fileserver with some some old PC.)  

[CWuestefeld]

I have a DNS-321. I'm not home to test this problem, but in general...

I don't think it's correct to say that the drive is NTFS. At least with my unit, and I think with anything that's doing Samba-type drive sharing, the actual file system is a black box. In the case of my DNS-321, the data is tored on the box in Ext2 format. My Windows installation has no idea how to read Ext2, and the NAS box, since it's running Linux internally, certainly has no clue about NTFS. All of the I/O happens at a logical level above the file system.