Greetings all...
My Vista machine Blue Screened then upon reboot I received an error saying that drive was not readable. I tried mounting it as a secondary in an XP, Vista and a few Live CD's but each one failed with the machine locking up as long as the drive was connected. I then tried it on a FC8 machine and mounted the drive using a SATA to USB connector and was able to finally get some error messages. I don't have the exact error but when I tried to mount it with command line it gave me a NTFS file system in use error something with a mention of something like $Log. I then tried it with the FORCE option and it worked!!

So now I can view the disk contents (Phew!) but I was wondering if anyone knew a command I can run on the drive to try reset it so that it will boot again and not think the NTFS is in use. It appears the drive is physically OK.

If more exact errors are needed then once I get the data I need off of it I will unmount and remount capturing all errors…


Thanks in advance!!

Linux doesn't have any utilities that can correct filesystem errors on an NTFS filesystem AFAIK. I would try booting off the windows install cd and running chkdsk on the drive from within the windows recovery console:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Window...a6a4e1033.mspx

chkdsk can usually correct minor filesystem corruption on NTFS. You probably want to back up any personal data on there before running chkdsk on the drive.