Sunday, August 31, 2008

Mounting hibernated NTFS file system on to Linux

I had a problem with mounting my Windows NTFS file system which was Hibernated on to my Ubuntu 8.10 installation. When I'm trying to mount the file system as usual it gave me this error,

Windows is hibernated, refused to mount.
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Operation not permitted
The NTFS partition is hibernated. Please resume and shutdown Windows
properly, or mount the volume read-only with the 'ro' mount option, or
mount the volume read-write with the 'remove_hiberfile' mount option.
For example type on the command line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/ -o remove_hiberfile

After going through the previous message I tried to run the given command and try to mount the file system but it again gave me another error message like this,
$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:

Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.

Choice 2: If you don't have Windows then you can use the 'force' option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/ -o force

Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1 /media/ ntfs-3g force 0 0

As this error message describe I tried to run those commands but those command prompt the previous error I was given before this particular error. But hopefully when I tried to mount the file system as read only using the following command it worked fine for me,

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/ -o ro

So if you have the same problem you can mount your file system as read only using the command like that but to be honest I don't know how to mount the file system with write access.

2 comments :

Anonymous said...

I have the exact same problem! Have you found a way to mount the drive with write access? I can't find answers anywhere.

lahiru said...

No I do not think it would be possible. Logically if you change something in a hibernated file system it's totally illegal, if it's possible it would be a hack on windows because the file systems is hibernated. Only possible thing is mounting in read-only way.

Cheers
Lahiru