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I've copied pictures from my Slackware/Linux computer to an external NTFS hard drive many times before. The NTFS device is mainly used on Windows computers. It has worked very well until the latest time I copied files. Now Windows systems are unable to mount the drive. Instead, Windows suggests formatting the device. Nevertheless, the drive is perfectly mountable on my Linux machines. I suppose the cause of the problem is similar to: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/60310/how-should-i-prevent-data-corruption-on-an-ntfs-partition-shared-by-windows-and

My question is how to make the device mountable on Windows. The simplest way would perhaps be to make a backup and then format the device. This is however probably impossible or at least impractical since the hard drive is bigger than my computer hard drive. Is there any quick fix? What commands can be used to solve the problem? Is it possible to fix the problem on a Windows machine?

Now I've learned that using NTFS file systems on multiple OSes should be avoided. I suppose FAT-systems is the best option?

Thanks in advance for help!

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Rickard Hultgren
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    Have you tried using fsck on the drive as mentioned here: http://superuser.com/questions/233700/fsck-an-ntfs-drive-in-linux – D34DM347 Jan 11 '17 at 13:27
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    Well, first thing first: Do you have any backup? If not, you really, really should set up a backup solution before you start messing around with the file system. A single copy of data is always at risk, and recovery tools (including fsck) only exacerbate that risk. – user Jan 11 '17 at 13:31
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    Short answer: yes, make a backup first. After you've done a backup, try chkdsk from Windows on the problematic drive given that it is readable from Linux the damages should not be very severe. – Andrea Lazzarotto Jan 11 '17 at 16:31
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    @AndreaLazzarotto Woth mentioning that you can run chkdsk on the UUID of the drive in windows, since OP is not able to mount the drive on windows – MrPaulch Jan 13 '17 at 12:36
  • Thanks for the comments! What device is best for backups?

    CD/DVD might be the most secure choice, but the space on a DVD is not big.

    Unless an external hard drive has FAT, it is error prone when used on different OSes. But FAT is not designed for the capacity of modern EHD. I think that EHD is not the optimal choice for me.

    As I understand it, NAS is designed to only be accessed through the internet. Thus there is no LAN function in a NAS-server?

    Are there any LAN-servers that behave like EHD? Something that I can connect to my USB-port. Any other ideas?

     – Rickard Hultgren Jan 14 '17 at 00:18
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    You might want to use exFAT if you want a modern file system with high compatibilities among operating systems. NAS stands for "network attached storage", there is nothing preventing you from using one in a LAN (actually, it's quite common). – Andrea Lazzarotto Jan 17 '17 at 15:49
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    Is it a superfloppy (filesystem on the entire device, no partition table)? If so, you may be experiencing something similar to this problem. – Kamil Maciorowski Mar 04 '17 at 19:12
  • Thanks for all the comments! Now I got a deeper understanding of filesystems. The problem with the hard drive turned out to be the old hard drive getting bad sectors. In other words the linux system was better at mounting the damaged disk than the windows system, which I find surprising. There wasn't many damaged files, so I could save most of them. I formatted a new hard drive with FAT and copied all the unbroken files to the new FAT-harddrive. – Rickard Hultgren Sep 16 '17 at 04:46

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