Hi all,

I'm not really sure if this is supposed to go here as it is mainly a Windows problem, but since Linux is involved I thought I could post it here... anyway, here goes:

I have recently installed a new, larger hard drive on my machine. I partitioned it with gparted (2 NTFS partitions, 2 ext3 partitions and a Linux swap partition), then moved my data AND my Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron") installation over to the new hard drive using rsync. On the ext3 side, everything looks OK, I just had to edit the GRUB configuration file and my Linux installation booted up. All files in /home (separate partition) seem OK too, and all my settings are intact.

However, the NTFS side has a problem: I know Windows installations can't be (easily) moved from a hard drive to another, so I only moved files from the second NTFS partition (larger). I then installed Windows Vista on the first (smaller) partition, and upon booting, Vista wanted to check my second NTFS partition. I thought to myself, "OK, it must have been something with the unmounting or whatever, let it roll".

The check finished, and it reported OK. But when I tried to access the partition inside Vista, it told me "the volume is corrupted and can't be read". It keeps asking me to check the filesystem at every boot. (Installing drivers was a double pain because of that.) Strangely enough, I can mount the NTFS volume in question on Linux and access all my files. What's wrong?

I can't really say what would cause that problem, as I haven't used Vista enough to make any sort of recommendation. Though my first thought was that Vista might use a newer version of NTFS?

If space permits, I would simply copy the data to one of the EXT3 partitions from Ubuntu, then reformat the partition under Vista and copy the data back onto it.

One thing you could try is to install the ntfsprogs package and run ntfsfix on that partition. It doesn't fix all problems, but marks the partition so that when you boot into Vista, it will continue the process looking for more errors before marking the partition good.
Maybe after that it will boot up better.

I just tried what MS3FGX suggested - I still had most of the data on the old hard drive. Formatted the partition in Vista then copied the data back using Linux - and it happened again. I think I'm supposed to do that from Vista instead, so whatever is getting in the way doesn't do so. Thanks guys.

Problem solved. I copied the data back using Vista, except for one folder (with a large amount of data) which was backed up on the ext3 partition. I think it turned out that a filename with special characters was causing the problem, maybe same as here (char encoding differences between Vista and Linux, maybe?) as I got an error while copying the file in question in Vista that didn't happen in Linux. (Strangely enough, the source partition is also NTFS and contains no errors...)

Once again, thanks for the replies.

Pretty strange that you had so much trouble copying the files back over. Must be something about the files and or filenames that Vista doesn't handle well. Like I said earlier, I am not an expert at Vista so I couldn't say why it would behave that way.

But at least it got straightened out in the end.

If you can't handle a file because the filename is in a strange encoding, one trick is to use "ls -li" to also list the inode of the file. Then you can use the "file" command to locate a file with that inode (-inum <inode#>) and the process the file after the -exec option:
example:
find . -maxdepth 1 -inum 20050 -exec mv '{}' /mnt/disk/

This can also help if you have two files with the same filename.

Sometimes cutting and pasting the filename in konsole and pasting the name when typing a command will work.