"fsck" for ntfs ?

[Preston Hagar]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 11:20 AM, stan <stanb at panix.com> wrote:
> I was tying to sue Ubuntu to help a friend recover data from a disk from a
> crashed windows machine this weekend. Ultimately, I was unable to do so
> because I could not get the ntfs partition on his disk mounted. This appears
> to be because the disk had not been "marked clean" when his machine
> crashed, or at least that is how I interpreted the error message. Even adding
> the "force" option to the ntfs flavor of mount did not work.
>
> Am I interpreting this correctly? If so, is there a tool that can do the
> equivalent of fsck for ntfs?
>
>

There is ntfsfix, which sometimes helps:

sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

ntfsfix /dev/sdX

There is a decent chance ntfsfix will give you the same message
though.  Usually, the most reliable thing I have found is to boot to a
Windows XP install disk, run the recovery console, run a chkdsk on the
disk and then try to work with it in linux.  Another option is to use
NTFS Undelete, or Unstoppable Copier, but both of those are
Windows/non-Linux programs.

In general, Linux can help copy files off a drive if the ntfs
partition is in good shape, but Windows won't boot for some reason.
When the ntfs partition is messed up (even if it is just an unclean
mount, like from sudden power loss, or pulling the drive without
unmounting/ejecting), then it is usually best to first use Windows
tools to get the partition in decent shape and then move on to Linux
if you want to use it to copy the data.

Hope this helps,

Preston