[aklug] Re: Repairing an NTFS volume in Linux

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 9:22 PM, Tim Gibney <timgibney76@gmail.com> wrote:
> The whole volume is toast and not NTFS. The NTFS utilities wont work. I used
> a utility called testdisk. It made my partition bootable but grub can't
> connect to it and some Linux based utilities now say it is not formatted at
> all. I guess I should give a warning for Fedora users to watch out when
> shrinking their NTFS volumes with Fedora 14 as it is a bug.
> I am about to reinstall Windows unless someone has any other suggestions.

I have had good success shrinking NTFS volumes with gparted, but they
strongly advise a full backup before doing so, as it's an inherently
risky process (and a closed-source filesystem.)

Testdisk will help to fix corrupted partition tables, but that doesn't
explain how the table got corrupted. That does sound like a problem
with Fedora, or at least a problem with your bootloader, as you
mentioned grub.

I'm assuming at this point that the NTFS partition won't mount in
Fedora, right? So there's no way to check if it has a working Windows
system on it? Either way, the Windows repair wouldn't know about your
custom boot loader and OS menu.

> Also I was under the impression that a Vm from virtual box can not read the
> host's hard drive. Am I wrong about this? I can not even mount it.

If you give a host's hard drive (or more usually, partitions) to a VM,
it can read and write directly to it.

From the Fedora forums, I gather that multibooting is a nefarious
beast. I defer to others with more experience.

Sorry to hear of your troubles,
jermudgeon
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Received on Wed, 3 Nov 2010 21:47:20 -0800