Hello,

I had a system crash on a Windows 7 laptop and am trying to recover my data. Using a sata/usb adapter, I have the disk plugged into a Linux server I use for testing. I've installed ntfs-3g and when I try to mount, I get the following message:

The file system wasn't safely closed on Windows. Fixing.

Some searching hasn't found much. This process has been running for about on hour on a 160GB drive. At this point, I only want to recover as much data as possible. Should I kill the process and mount again using '-o force' flag?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Hi,

This is a normal consequence of a Windows crash and trying to mount with ntfs-3g without mounting on Windows first.

Which process ? Do you mean ntfs-3g has been unsuccessfully trying to mount for one hour ?

The obvious way to recover is to mount on Windows and start a chkdsk. Mounting with "-o force" will probably not fix a severely damaged partition.

*edit*

Maybe this is your Win7 system partition and you cannot boot on it any more. Then first try to connect to another Windows system and start chkdsk, or use the Tuxera non-free repair utility on Linux. Mounting with "-o force" may be useful to recover your data, though unlikely to make Win7 bootable again.

Regards

Jean-Pierre