I've copied pictures from my Slackware/Linux computer to an external NTFS hard drive many times before. The NTFS device is mainly used on Windows computers. It has worked very well until the latest time I copied files. Now Windows systems are unable to mount the drive. Instead, Windows suggests formatting the device. Nevertheless, the drive is perfectly mountable on my Linux machines. I suppose the cause of the problem is similar to: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...by-windows-and

My question is how to make the device mountable on Windows. The simplest way would perhaps be to make a backup and then format the device. This is however probably impossible or at least impractical since the hard drive is bigger than my computer hard drive. Is there any quick fix? What commands can be used to solve the problem? Is it possible to fix the problem on a Windows machine?

Now I've learned that using NTFS file systems on multiple OSes should be avoided. I suppose FAT-systems is the best option?

Thanks in advance for help!

Hi,

I am afraid you might be in wrong forum.
Basically, you are asking Linux users how to fix an NTFS partition on Windows!

Not really. He has damaged NTFS partition while working under Linux.
Sababa, try to boot Slack again and as the first step (if u havent done that yet) execute: Make sure it is not mounted.
Another thing I would try is Gparted - either install it on your Linux-box or just boot up from Live CD: http://gparted.org/livecd.php

Before executing any of the above I would do backup (at least the most important files) since you still have access to it.
Good luck.

ps.
make sure that none of the files copied under Linux contain special characters like eg. ":"

1 members found this post helpful.

Czezz, thanks for the reply!

What device is best for backups when using multiple OSes?

• Unless an external hard drive has FAT, it is error prone when used on different OSes. But FAT is not designed for the capacity of modern EHD. Therefore I think that EHD is not the optimal choice for me.
• A server solution solves the issue with filesystems. As I understand it, NAS is designed to only be accessed through the internet. Thus there is no LAN function in a NAS-server?
• A LAN server would perhaps be the optimal solution but I suppose it is complicated to set everything up. Are there any LAN-servers that behave like EHD? Something that I can connect to my USB-port. Any other ideas?

Hi,
I understand this is for home solution. In this case just take any USB HDD.
If you really want to use FAT then format your backup disk/storage with extFAT (mkfs.exfat /dev/your_backup_dev).
However, I would really recommend either ext4 or just NTFS.

NAS can be used in LAN. Google for: QNAP, Synology... and others. Its trivial to set it up.
Honestly: if this is just for your desktop do it simple - buy USB HDD.

do you have ntfs-3g installed on Linux?
So you know linux is (should be) dealing with ntfs correctly.
4GB limit for FAT32, if I remember correctly. if it is not over 4GB format to FAT32.

Thanks for all the replies! The problem with the hard drive turned out to be the old hard drive getting bad sectors. In other words the linux system was better at mounting the damaged disk than the windows system. There wasn't many damaged files, so I could save most of them. I formatted a new hard drive with FAT and copied all the unbroken files to the new FAT-harddrive.

^ glad to hear that.

now if you please would mark your thread [Solved] (blue menu bar => thread tools).
thanks.

USB a la http://rsync.net/resources/howto/rsync.html