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Yesterday, I installed Ubuntu 16.04 on an old HP Pavilion G4 notebook. The HDD had 3 NTFS partitions:

  • Windows Loader
  • Windows System
  • Data

The user of the laptop is not sure how to use Ubuntu. She lives in Uruguay and alot of people use Linux with Ubuntu there. Because of this, I want to give her her old NTFS data partition to use it with Linux.

The creation was easy, but if I try to open the partition with the file manager, possibly Nautilus, I get this:

Error mounting /dev/sda3 at /media/pilar/data:
Command-line 

mount -t "ntfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=1000,gid=1000" "/dev/sda3" "/media/pilar/data"

exited with non-zero exit status 14: The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Failed to mount '/dev/sda3': Operation not permitted
The NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown
Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting), or mount the volume read-only
with the 'ro' mount option.

I checked the NTFS partition with gparted. No error.

Why is Ubuntu unable to mount this partition? I prefer to solve this problem only with the GUI system.

Byte Commander
  • 110,243
willi uebelherr
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1 Answers1

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For some reason, Windows has decided to put hibernation data in drives where it doesn't seem to store any, even after a full shut down in some cases. Ubuntu won't mount these as a safety feature, to prevent loss of hibernated data.

However, like I said before, Windows doesn't always actually have hibernation data on the partition you want to mount. You might also just not care about the hibernation data and you really need to get to your Windows partition.

That's where ntfsfix comes in. It removes the hibernation data and allows Ubuntu to mount the partition. Run:

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdXY

(where X is the drive letter and Y is the partition number)
on an NTFS partition. It will do its magic and leave you with a mountable NTFS drive.

TheWanderer
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