In this unintentional continuing series of complaints about Windows, today I vent a little bit about NTFS. I’ve spent most of the last couple of days recovering a system from a hard drive crash. Fortunately I had already made backups of everything important and I actually had confidence that I could get the system back up in the usual manner. Boot the Windows set up CD then open the Recovery console, etc…
As you can guess, this did not transpire. Instead the machine froze on every attemp to get to the Recovery console. And, btw, Disk Doctor from emergency floppies doesn’t do NTFS. Lovely, so when an NTFS formatted disk bites the big one, that’s just it for all practical purposes. At least I haven’t yet found an alternate utility to fix an NTFS disk from the command prompt. Now there are things to like about NTFS, like smaller cluster sizes on large disks and user permissions, but for most users, being able to fix it when it breaks may take precedence. Right now, I’m definitely thinking about some alternatives. But alas, I fear I have no practical alternatives, at least professionally…
Enough venting, back to work!
2 replies on “Just Say No To NTFS”
If you have some familiarity with Linux, you could use boot with a live cd and mount the ntfs partition. This gives you read access, but you’ll need an additional non-ntfs partition (or network location) to copy files to. I did this when upgrading a machine a few months back, and after reading up on fstab files I was able to map the partition and access the files.
[1] Thanks, I actually ended up booting from the Knoppix Live CD to check if there was any data I needed to save. Once I was sure I had what I needed, I blew away the partitions and just for fun installed Linux before I sent the drive back to Dell. This was good practice for another project I’m working on and was a handy way to wipe the drive before I sent it back.