Accessing NTFS from EXT4

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Until I upgraded WIndow 8 to 8.1 I was able to access the files on the its partition (separate HD) from Ext4. Since the upgrade whilst Nautilus see's the NTFS drive it cannot access it. Any Ideas?

Nautilus in Fedora hasn't stored my windows FS for at least a year. I just use dropbox or VM guest utilities...

This should not be a problem, as pretty much all default Linux Kernels that ship with Linux distros have the NTFS support module. Have you tried mounting the drive via Palimpsest? (Palimpsest is the GNOME disk utility)

Also, try a live Linux image and see if you're able to mount the NTFS partition. --If you're still unable to do this, then it could mean that the current version of NTFS is revised enough to be incompatible with the current Linux NTFS module.

Support for NTFS has been stable for a while now and most distros would include ntfs-3g to handle it.

Try a basic mount test which won't hide stuff behind a GUI, and see what happens -
At a shell prompt in your home directory:
mkdir tmp
Assuming the ntfs partition is on sdb2 (change as appropriate), do:
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g -r /dev/sdb2 tmp/

That should mount it read-only on the tmp directory, so doing: ls tmp/ ought to show the files Ok.
Unless it's encrypted, which AFAIK is not supported.
I don't think the on-disk NTFS format has changed since WinXP, at v3.1.

I tried the terminal command and this was the response

Mount is denied because the NTFS volume is already exclusively opened.
The volume may be already mounted, or another software may use it which
could be identified for example by the help of the 'fuser' command.

So in other words I assume that although I have set Windows 8.1 to completely shut down it is not doing so.

As that response said, it might already be mounted.
At a shell prompt, do: mount | grep /dev/xxx (where "xxx" is the name of your actual NTFS partition)
If you get an output starting with something like /dev/xxx on /some/path type ntfs (or type fuser - I can't get to my other box just now) then the /some/path part will be where it is mounted.

What did you previously do to get access to the partition before upgrading Windows, and is there any error from Nautilus when you try to access it?

Thanks Cornflake, I have fixed the issue by adding "remove_hiberfile" in the mount options in Gnome disks. Seems strange that I should need to do this as all settings in windows have fast start turned off.

Ah, good. I was far too slow in editing my post to correct some errors, and I've also been able to check how my box responds to mounting an NTFS partition.

This is a protective measure made when a hibernated NTFS partition is mounted as r/w, because writing to a drive left hibernated by Windows might cause huge problems and possibly corruption as Windows tries to come out of hibernation later on. Essentially, you would have snuck in and made changes to the filesystem which the hibernated Windows system wouldn't know about.
Be careful though: adding the "remove_hiberfile" option to the Linux mount will delete the hibernation file so any saved Windows session will be completely lost.
See: man mount.ntfs-3g for more info on that.

If Windows had been completely shut down (that may not be the default option) there would be no issue since there would only be the actual, written data on the disk to worry about: there would be no sleeping OS with its own idea of what's out there.
I'd guess this problem appeared after you updated because "Hibernate" was (re)activated as the default. The new Win7 installation I set up recently had this as the default shutdown operation too.

ETA: On Win7 (and probably Win8) the "Hibernate" action can be completely disabled by opening an "elevated" cmd prompt and typing: powercfg -h off
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 10%29.aspx

I have gone through all the settings and made sure that ntfs should shut down completely and nautilus is still showing it as mounted as is the command line. it all worked fine on windows 8.0 but 8.1 is not playing fair. So your warning on using "remove_hiberfile" may be valid as the disk is behaving as though it is in hibernation. Thanks for your help so far. I will try the powercfg -h off command later. Cheers

I forget the details now (and I'm quite happy with that - working with Windows is often like dealing with a whiny brat ) - but what used to be plain ol' "hibernation" is now some sort of hybrid of "shutdown" and "hibernation". AFAIK this idea is part of a wider plan to make the machine start up faster.
So although the machine is physically powered off and in a state called "shutdown", the result on the disk still looks like a hibernation.

Using that powercfg -h off command makes hibernation of any sort impossible and also removes some hibernation-related options from the GUI's power management setup, but the whole thing is reversible by using "on" instead of "off".

I don't like the idea of hibernation on a desktop machine (as it is with my Win7 installation) in principle so having discovered this hybrid hibernation was the default power-off action, I shot it on sight. It was only after that, having beaten the rest of the installation into shape, that I poked about with accessing it via Linux and I've had no problems with mounting the NTFS partition r/w.
(which is just as well, because I needed to access it outside of Windows to fix a problem that Windows Update created for itself. Trying to repair that by hand from within Windows was impossible, even in so-called "safe mode", due to the mess of permissions involved and the official fix from Microsoft was... reinstall Windows. Hah - not true)

So True



This is the standard MS approach, reload. Reinstall etc. Every Tuesday our local ABC radio has a computer talk back segment, I have managed to persuade the windows fan boy who runs it that accessing ntfs from a live boot or linux partition has its merits especially when trying to rid it of malware and recovering data.

Considering the fact that WIndows breaks, and that this can be catastrophic, it surprises me that MS have not caught on to the idea of installing Root and User data onto separate partitions. So handy just reinstall the OS and all your data and settings remain unchanged

Thanks Cornflake; powercfg -h off worked a charm.

Typical of MS to give you an all or nothing option.

It's not like it's impossible or something - you can certainly set it up that way.

And will it let you re-install the OS and automatically pick up your old settings.

Excellent!
I suspect the preferred description would be "innovative".