NTFS freezes?

[varrin]

Greetings,

I've run into a problem that has me puzzled. It's a bit of a muddled situation but it may reveal a bug somehow related to NTFS.

The subject machine has a 60 gig PATA hard drive. It had a working install of XP on a single NTFS partition. Working is a bit of an overstatement. Kids (10 and 11) use it and had junked it up with viruses, malware, etc. etc. But it would boot anyway. The have some data on it but nothing earth shatteringly critical. I decided to try to throw Mageia on it and move them in that direction.

Put in the Mageia 2 live CD. Got to diskdrake in the install process. Chose to use existing space on the NTFS partition. It offered 6 gigs. I chose around ~30ish (they had 20 or 25ish used on the WinXP side). It proceeded to resize the partition all on its own (eh???). That made me a tad nervous. The rest of the install finished uneventfully.

When I rebooted, I tried to boot into the XP partition. It showed me the splash screen and promptly powered itself off. Several retries yielded the same results. Went back to Mageia and couldn't load up the XP partition. Did some research. Wound up using testdisk to fix the XP partition. Diskdrake crunched the partition but didn't fix its reported size. Oops. After that, XP booted again (though I had to go through some hoops to get it really running... checkdisk, defrag, etc.).

Back to Mageia, with the NTFS partition fixed, it now freezes as soon as some (but not all) action is taken to interact with the NTFS partition. When I say "freezes" I mean the machine suddenly stops, displays a white screen, the drive lights remains in its present state (either on or off), and nothing works except totally powering down the machine. It does this when Dolphin is opened, but not within diskdrake when "view" is used on the NTFS partition (it correctly displays data there). I checked the logs and there is nothing logged in kernel/*.log, syslog, dmesg, and so on. No trace of what happened. It is easily repeatable. On boot, open up Dolphin and it freezes. If I use "view" in diskdrake first, I can get dolphin opened, but as soon as I click the NTFS partition in the left pane, it freezes. WinXP continues to work 'correctly' (as correctly as it can, anyway).

Just for grins, I deleted and reinstalled Mageia with fresh partitions (leaving the NTFS partition alone). I thought maybe the testdisk activity might have messed something up on the Mageia side. The fresh install behaves identically.

Here are my questions:

1: Has anyone encountered this kind of problem before?

2: Is there any logging I can enable that might help diagnose the problem?

3: Is there a way to get Mageia to ignore /dev/sda1? (I hate to do this because I'd like to interact with the data, but I could just copy it over if need be)

Thanks in advance for whatever help might be available.

V-

[tom_]

1: Has anyone encountered this kind of problem before?

sorry, no ntfs partition on my PCs

2: Is there any logging I can enable that might help diagnose the problem?

sure, the option 'debug' is present in

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man mount.ntfs-3g

3: Is there a way to get Mageia to ignore /dev/sda1?

have you tried to comment the related line in /etc/fstab and reboot?

[varrin]

2: Is there any logging I can enable that might help diagnose the problem?

sure, the option 'debug' is present in

Code: Select all

man mount.ntfs-3g

I'll look into that. For what it's worth, the mounting appears to be automatic when Dolphin is opened. The partition is not mounted prior to that.

3: Is there a way to get Mageia to ignore /dev/sda1?

have you tried to comment the related line in /etc/fstab and reboot?[/quote]

It's not in fstab because it's not mounted at boot. That may well be a clue right there... I'll try mounting it with debug and report back (might not be real quick, but I bet you're in no rush..

V-

[doktor5000]

First, you should be sure that the partition and the drive is really good. Did you do a chkdsk /f/r (i.e. complete) run when in windows? Also, this should preferably be done via some windows install disk or other windows live-cd, to make sure nothing on that partition is in used, when chkdsk runs. If you try that when windows is running via the GUI (tick both checkboxes), it will tell you that it needs a reboot to do this (it will schedule it for next boot process) this may take quite some time depending on the speed of the disk, i'd say 1 to 3 hours, just FYI.

Then you need to rule out that the drive itself has any defects, but first things first. Do the checkdisk run as suggested, and report back.
It would also be nice if you could post that chkdsk output here, so maybe do something like

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chkdsk /f/r c: > log.txt | type log.txt

c: being the name of the drive under windows, and log.txt the name of the log file.

But i'm not really sure, that this exact commands works, or at least it's untested as far as if keyboard input to chkdsk is required.