Offical rwx files taht are in fact --- files!

[Chris Mohler]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 8:38 PM, Ray Parrish <crp at cmc.net> wrote:
> François Huot wrote:
>> Here is a difficult case: a friend brought me a hard drive from a
>> Windows that has crashed and it wants to retrieve files. After I
>> connect the disc to my Ubutu 8.10 with a USB port, I can see the files
>> with the  ls command: the files are all rwxrwxrwx ... the problem is
>> that when I want to see or copy these files, I 'm told that I don't
>> have permission to do so, either in graphics mode (using a file
>> manager) or from the command line (with cp ). I obviously used chmod
>> command to confirm the rwx attributes of files, but it is useless...
>> I'm never allowed to see, copy or transfer these files...
>>
>> Can anyone solve this mystery?
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>> François Huot
>> Montréal
> I've encountered this problem on my dual boot system after Windows XP
> has shut down uncleanly [crashed]. Windows writes something to the
> drive, which doesn't get reset when the system crashes, and this makes
> it unreadable or unmountable [can't remember which it was] until you can
> successfully boot into Windows again, and subsequently attain a clean
> shutdown of Windows.
>
> I don't know of any workarounds, sorry.

Is that the "NTFS dirty flag"?  I thought that made it unmountable?
Anyway - if that's the problem, you'll probably need a XP boot disc -
you need to boot into recovery mode (F8?) and run chkdsk.  AFAIK, fsck
cannot handle NTFS well enough to reset the flag - but I just googled
this:
http://ubuntuguru.wordpress.com/2007/03/15/testdisk-saves-the-day/

Never tried it though - good luck!

Chris