Re: [Sheflug] Bad Penny is back ;-)

[John Southern <linuxtarragon@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ruth,

Let me ask some questions to start with.

1) Do you still have access to these disks under Windows?
2) Do you intend to ever use the Windows systems again? (Dual booting).

The reason for the first question is sometimes a Windows system does not
close down in what we think is a normal manner and leaves the disks in a
hibernation state where it writes data to a hiberfil.sys file.
The typical way around this is to start in Windows and disable the
FastStartup.

It is not necessary to have to use Windows to fix this, but if you are
going to dual boot, then it is best if you disable the Fast Startup feature
Control Panel --> Power Options --> Choose what the power buttons do ->>
Under the "Define power buttons and turn on Password Protection" there
should be an option to "Change settings that are currently unavailable"
At the bottom of that page you should now have a section saying "Shutdown
Settings".
Uncheck the "Turn on fast startup (recommended)"
Save changes.

Without using Windows we can check to see what condition the drives are in
(all this is assuming you have the ntfs-3g and the fuseiso packages
installed
First let us identify which drives are NTFS on the system

*sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT*

this should give you something like
...
sdb
   sdb1                 16M
   sdb2      ntfs    3.6T /fred

This is showing me that the device sdb is the NTFS drive.

Alternatively

*sudo parted -l*
Disk /dev/sdb 3.7TB
...
number    start     End        Size      Filesystem
2               16M     3.6TB   3.6TB     ntfs

Alternatively the graphical tool gparted should show you what drive is an
ntfs partition type.


Let us make somewhere to mount the disk

*mkdir -p /mywindowsd*

Now we can try to mount it

*sudo mount -t ntfs-3g  /dev/sdb2 /mywindowsd*

we should now be able to access the disk

*ls /mywindowsd*

If you get an error message such as wrong fs type, bad option, bad
superblock on /dev/sdb2 take a look at

*sudo dmesg*

this is to see if the disk has a Dirty flag set?

sdb: sdb2
sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
ntfs3(sdb2): It is recommended to use chkdsk.
ntfs3(sdb2): volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!

We can reset the dirty flag which the Windows system set with the Fast
Startup

*sudo ntfsfix -d /dev/sdb2*

If it did mount, we can check how it mounted with

*mount*

looking down this list I find

/dev/sdb2 on /mywindowsd type fuseblk
(rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)

which is showing I have both read and write permissions.

Let us assume you only have read (ro permissions)
We can unmount with

*sudo umount /mywindowsd*

remount forcing read write with

*sudo mount -o rw -t ntfs-3g  /dev/sdb2 /mywindowsd*

Hopefully  at that point you have access to your drives. It is a pain to do
this every time you reboot your machine so you would then want to edit your
/etc/fstab file to automount. To give you an idea, mine with an ntfs drive
has the entry

UUID=3AFCF8FBFCF8B26D /mywindowsd ntfs-3g
defaults,nls=utf8,umask=0000,dmask=0022,fmask=0022,nofail,uid=1000,gid=1000,windows_names
0 2

The identifier UUID is found by running

*sudo blkid*

I quite like the https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fstab to explain the
options of fstab and https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=406087
for ntfs specifically.


There are some advantages to having the ntfs file system mounted. The main
one being if you ever want to dual boot.
In my case that is not an issue, but I have some encryption that is ntfs
only for secure at rest drives.
It can use EFS to encrypt individual files (with Linux we tend to lock the
whole drive with LUKS or ecryptfs although we can use fsencrypt for
individual files)

The alternative is true that ext4, or XFS or JFS or ZFS or btrfs have
advantages. If we widen it out, UFS under Solaris was replaced by ZFS. Aix
has JFS but is now JFS2. HP-UX had VxFS and EVFS or the old UFS(HFS) but
now AdvFS. It is all going to depend on your usage. I tend to use ext4
because I am familiar with the tools when things go wrong. That is not to
say other file systems do not have tools, just that I have struggled with
some.

Regards
John


On Wed, 29 Oct 2025 at 13:43, Ruth Gunstone <ruth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Long-time 'lurker' here.
> I've been on this mailing list for eons.  Dabbled in Linux and currently
> have a couple of elderly laptops running various distros (Kubuntu and
> Mint Mate).  Mostly a good experience - not least because it's saved a
> few bits of kit from the recycler or landfill!!
>
> I also fiddle about with a Raspberry Pi (well, three!) running a mixture
> of Linux and RISC OS (yes!!!)
>
> Anyway, since M$ got all stroppy and are forcing everyone off Win 10
> (and I got equally stroppy and said "f###-you M$"!), I've now started
> transitioning my main office PC to Linux.  I've gone with Linux Mint
> (cinnamon) as I've used it on one of my laptops and it's solid and I can
> find my way around most of what I need to do.
>
> So . . .
> Main system disc (containing Windows 10 + apps) removed from PC.
> New 1TB M.2 drive installed. Linux Mint installed. Pretty much without
> incident :-)
>
> Here's where I'm stuck...
> My PC has several additional hard-drives installed. Some are
> partitioned. Windows 'saw' them as drives "D","E"... etc.
>
> Linux Mint is 'seeing' these drives/partitions (all NTFS), but
> steadfastly refuses to let me do anything on them. This is very
> unfortunate as ALL my work files, video projects, audio mixing projects
> etc., etc. are stored there.  Yes, I COULD copy the contents onto my 1TB
> 'linux' drive, but that seems very wasteful.  I'd much rather be able to
> access the drives/files normally from Linux.   I'm SURE I've done this
> before, somehow, but can't remember!
>
> I've tried using things like "chown" to take ownership of the folders,
> but "computer says no". "Read only filing system".
>
> Command-line stuff is really not my thing, and I end up swearing at the
> screen and going to make tea.
>
> Any help/suggestions very welcome . . .
>
> Be kind :-)
>
>
> TTFN!
> Ruth
>
>
>
>
> --
> Ruth Gunstone
> Audio Visual Services
> 07870 993379
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
> GNU - The Choice of a Complete Generation
>
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