Formatting a Hard Drive for DCP Transfer

[Martin McCaffery]

I occasionally have to convert things to DCP using DCP-O-Matic. Usually I just put the finished product on a thumb drive and ingest it without problem. Sometimes, I have DCP's that are bigger than any thumb drive I have. I had hoped to get around this by getting a 5tb portable drive to use to create, store and transfer DCP's. So far, however, I have had no luck in transferring because the IMB does not see any content on the drive.
Currently I am using NTFS as the format. I don't have a Linux partition, so have'd tried EXT formats.
Is there a drive partition I should be creating?
I have a Solaria with a new GDC SR-1000 IMB, though this problem predates the GDC. I have used the GDC to ingest smaller files I created that were on thumb drives, so that doesn't seem to be the problem.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

IIRC NTFS is not a DCI compliant drive format so you will have to get your drive formatted to EXT 2 or 3. I don't recall a specific partition requirement though.

[Jason Raftery]

On drives larger than 2TB, make sure you're formatting the drive with a single partition using MBR (master boot record) instead of GPT as many operating systems and drive manufacturers default to GPT these days.

EXT2 or EXT3 filesystem with an inode size of 128 bytes is standard, but most servers will read content on a NTFS formatted drive so long as it is MBR with one partition. I haven't used the SR-1000 but older model GDCs are able to ingest from NTFS drives fine.

ISDCF has a good writeup on content delivery recommendations at https://isdcf.com/papers/ISDCF-Doc3-Delivery-Recs.pdf that covers this and more.

[Jim Cassedy]

While EXT2 or EXT3 are the officially DCP compliant formats, I have ingested more NTFS formatted drives than I can count at dozens of film festivals over past 8 years or so without any problems. Before I had the ability to format in EXT2, myself I always used NTFS as my 'default' DCP drive/thumbdrive format. On the few occasions that I had an NTSF drive that wouldn't ingest, it was usually because It was either not formatted with the single partition MBR, as in Jason's post; or, the most common 2nd cause was that the film-maker had either not transferred the correct files over from DCP-O-MATIC, or, they had a bunch of other "non DCP" garbage files on the drive, such as press releases, multiple edit versions in pro-res or some other video format,, photos, etc. But I've never had a problem ingesting a "clean" (no garbage files) and properly formatted NTSF drive on any of the major brands of servers I've worked with.

[Martin McCaffery]

I cleaned it and converted it to MBR format, but can't format it in Windows. I plugged it into the Mac, and it says it is too big to be formatted in ExFat using MBR. A quick look online says there is a 2TB size limit for MBR, and this drive is 5TB. Do I just have to order a new 2TB drive, or is there a workaround?

[Leo Enticknap]

If you boot a computer into an Ubuntu live image, then run GPartEd, that should enable you to put an MBR on it, followed by a 2TB NTFS partition.

[Ed Gordon]

If you are already running Windows, download Minitools Partition Magic (https://www.partitionwizard.com/) and install it. It will format any drive in any format you require. It is free.

[Carsten Kurz]

Usually, for local transfer, NTFS ist fine and the safest way if you come from a windows machine. However I don't know for sure wether the GDC SR-1000 can read NTFS. I bet it does, but...

Your actual problem may really be the 5TB drive. From 2TB up, issues with drive structure mappings may become a problem through the USB interface, or the kernel/driver on the IMS simply not supporting larger drives.

For DCPs, I would always stick to a drive max 2TB in size.
Note that the recent test version of DCP-o-matic will write ext3 discs directly, however, again, I wouldn't try this for a 5TB mobile drive. Using ext2/ext3 also creates issues managing content on your desktop machine, you need an ext2/3 driver with write capability, and those do not necessarily work solidly on such large drives.


Again, I would recommend buying a smaller drive and trying NTFS on a single MBR partitioned volume first.

Often nowadays, mobile drives come prepartitioned as GUID/GPT, and it is a bit of a pain to revert this to MBR in windows - you need to make yourself familiar with DISKPART on the commandline. Well at least you only have to do that once. If you buy the cheapest 500GB drive, chances are higher that it will come prepartitioned as MBR.

[Martin McCaffery]

Got it working. Cleaned the disk then used DISKPART to convert it to MBR. Did all this before Ed posted about Partition Magic (also got started on Ubuntu Live). Partition Magic did the trick.
I now have a 2TB NTFS partition on the 5TB drive and was able to transfer and ingest what I needed. Is it possible to format the other 3TB into a different format and still use the 2TB for transfer and ingest? I'll probably just get a 2TB drive, but it would be good to know.

Thanks to everyone for the guidance.

[Carsten Kurz]

You can try - most DCI servers will only see the first MBR partition. You should be able to create more partitions in the free space - e.g. 2+1 or 1.5+1.5

2TB is max for MBR.