[OT] Re: Mount NTFS disk as a read and write volume and not read only.

Jeff Vian jvian10 at charter.net
Mon Nov 20 06:41:57 UTC 2006


On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 21:30 -0500, redhatdude at bellsouth.net wrote:
> On Nov 19, 2006, at 7:40 PM, Craig White wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 16:29 -0800, Peter Gordon wrote:
> >> On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 19:18 -0500, redhatdude at bellsouth.net wrote:
> >>> Surely less hassle if the disk wasn't completely full, 26k left.  
> >>> When
> >>> I did what you're suggesting, the windows installer didn't recognize
> >>> the parition format and wanted to reformat it. With ntfsfix I was
> >>> able to repair the disk, cause windows crashed when the disk got
> >>> full, and with ntfs-3g I mounted it and deleted all the junk it had.
> >>> I put it back in the PC and windows booted with no problem.
> >>> Thanks
> >>> EJ
> >>
> >> I find it rather amusing that Microsoft's own tools could not fix the
> >> NTFS stuff, but Free tools which were entirely reverse-engineered  
> >> had no
> >> troubles fixing it. :)
> > ----
> > I would expect that if you put the drive into a computer that had a
> > Windows boot disk, you could mount the disk and do much the same  
> > thing.
> > Not much to marvel at...move on.
> >
> > Craig
> 
> I place the hard drive in one of those enclosures to make it portable  
> and plug it into a PC. It never mounted and after five minutes  
> Windows crashed. After restarting the PC, the same happened. This is  
> the reason I turned to this list for advice. I think there's enough  
> to marvel. I called a PC tech I know and he told me that if the disk  
> got completely full it was probably damaged and I had nothing to do  
> but reformat it. The Windows XP installer, after booting into rescue  
> mode,  gave me an unknown format partition message and asked to  
> reformat the drive.
> With Fedora it worked.
> EJ

Yep, Fedora (like most versions of Linux) allows the user to choose.
Unlike that other brain-dead OS that knows more than you do about what
you want it to do.
If the MFT on ntfs gets even the slightest corruption (likely with a
full disk) Windows is unable to mount it or read it.  It needs space on
the same drive to fix it.  Windows needs a lot of space to run any of
its filesystem utilities, and it needs it on the affected drive, not
just anywhere.

Space is needed to even mount it because it has to write to the drive in
order to mount it.  Thus the catch 22.  You cannot mount it so you need
to fix it. You cannot fix it without mounting it.  
ERGO, as your friend said, the disk is <sic> damaged and the only fix
Windows has for most things is reboot or reinstall.  Gee, if the disk is
damaged then it cannot be used because it is, well, damaged.  I wonder
if they confuse filesystem damage (can be repaired) with hardware damage
(cannot be repaired) ... After all the OS is as brain-dead as the
users/techs/developers seem at times to be.
 l

> 




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