Hi to everyone on the forum.
As subject, I'm encountering the problem of data loss when writing to a mounted NTFS partition from my linux Mint (Isadora 64bit).
Every modification is there as long as I'm on mint, but when I log into windows (7) data are like frozen in the previous state (before any change made through Mint).
So, on the next reboot in windows:
- if I modify any data, modifications disappear;
- if I write new data, they don't exist any more.

As far as I understand this is how it works:
I leave Win7 hibernated, most of the times. And that's it.
Writing files in Mint and opening win7 previously hibernated results in an apparent data-loss.
If I reboot in win7, the files are there.
I double checked: files written in Mint are there if I open Win7 previously shut-down.

Can anyone please confirm?

Thanks in advance,
Samuele.

Hi,


When leaving Win7 hibernated, the file system data which was held in cache is not written to its normal location, but it is written within the system image into some special file. When Win7 is awakened, the cache is restored to its state before it was hibernated, and if the file system was changed in the meantime, the cache is not consistent with actual data.
So never mount as read+write a file system which was active when Windows was hibernated.

Regards

Jean-Pierre

thanks for the reply.

Doesn't Windows mark the partition that it has mounted?
Or at least in case of hibernating?
So ntfs-3g could at least give some warning if such a partition is mounted in Linux (or MacOS...) ?

Hi,


It does.

This is a different thing. When hibernating Windows creates a special file on the system partition, so ntfs-3g is not aware of hibernation when mounting another partition (whose updates may be temporarily stored on the system partition during the hibernation).

Yes it can, this is controlled by the mount options recover/norecover. Now the default is recover. By the way I see this is not mentioned in the manual, I will add it for the next release.

Regards

Jean-Pierre

I am afraid this has happened to me, too. I have Win7/64-bit and Debian Squeeze installed on my PC. While Win7 was hibernated I used Debian for quite a while (read: several weeks) and wrote quite a lot of data on the NTFS partition. I was quite impressed how well writing to NTFS works now.

Completely unaware of potential issues I went back to Win7 only to discover that all my recent data had disappeared.

Is there anything I could do to recover the files? I tried running chkdsk /f on my ntfs partitions and it recovered something but not nearly all.

It would be nice to get a warning when mounting a mounted-by-windows partition, and the mount should then be read-only by default.

Hi,


I agree that this would be nice, but I am not sure Windows provides usable information.

Anyway, ntfs-3g is supposed to refuse to mount a Windows system partition on which Windows was hibernated. When you lost data, can you confirm this was not on a Windows *system* partition ?

On a non-system partition, I suppose Win 7 leaves the partition in the mounted state when being hibernated. If so, you should be able to avoid mounting on Linux by using the option norecover.

With Windows hibernated and no Windows partition mounted on Linux, can you post the outputs of :


Regards

Jean-Pierre