Really worrying bug in Windows (dual-boot with Dapper, after hibernate)

[Matthew Kuiken]

Chanchao wrote:
> This caused a nasty surprise for me today..
>
> I have my computer setup to dual-boot Windows and Dapper.  Windows
> (system & program files) is on an NTFS partition.  Data (My Documents)
> is on a FAT32 partition.  Then the rest is Ubuntu ext3.
>
> The problem occurred after I hibernate Windows, then boot Ubuntu and put
> files on the FAT32 disk.   After restoring Windows from hibernation, all
> those files were missing!!!  Even worse, after booting back into Dapper,
> those files were STILL missing.. they were just gone.
>
> It didn't cause THAT much damage for me today as I could recreate those
> files, but I thin this is potentially very serious and worrying behavior
> (By Windows).
>
> Do other people experience this??   Can hibernate be used at all on a
> shared/dual boot system?
>   

Chanchao,

I have experienced this, and I'm going to add a little bit more to the 
issue which should frighten you even more.  I almost lost my whole mail 
file, which is shared between XP and Linux because of this issue.

The frightening thing here is that XP caches the entire FAT32 structure 
into RAM while it is operating.  This would not be a big deal if the 
system just "lost" that information when it hibernated.  Unfortunately, 
it just stores the entire contents of RAM to the file that it will 
re-start from.  This means that if you make a change to a FAT32 disk 
while windows is hibernated, the change will not be in the memory when 
Windows re-starts!  If you write anything to the disk while Windows is 
in this state, it will write information from the FAT32 table it has 
stored in memory.  This can *majorly* screw up your file system.

Moral of the story:
Do *NOT* hibernate Windows and then enter any other OS, even another 
version of Windows.

I always shut down entirely out of Windows now.  If I have to boot that 
OS, and I see the "resume" screen, I kill it with the power button.  
It's just not worth the risk.

-Matt