Y26.org

Linux Saves The Day

10/22/2007

So last night Kate’s new laptop decided to corrupt it’s own boot partition for no apparent reason and throw the famous BSOD. After fooling around with Vista’s “safe mode” which was utterly useless I decided to try a Sabayon Linux live cd to see if I could pull some pics off that weren’t backed up yet.

I booted into Sabayon and started playing around with some of the included ntfs tools. I came across ntfsfix. From the man page this is what ntfsfix does:

man-page for “ntfsfix” dated January 2006, taken from ntfsprogs 2.0.0
This web-page was last updated: 2007-10-22, 14:17 (GMT+1)
Name
ntfsfix - fix common errors and force Windows to check NTFS
Synopsis
ntfsfix [options] device
Description
ntfsfix is a utility that fixes some common NTFS problems. ntfsfix is NOT a Linux version of chkdsk. It only repairs some fundamental NTFS inconsistencies, resets the NTFS journal file and schedules an NTFS consistency check for the first boot into Windows.

You may run ntfsfix on an NTFS volume if you think it was damaged by Windows or some other way and it cannot be mounted.

I have to say I was very impressed with it. ntfsfix did exactly what it was supposed to. I rebooted the machine back into Vista and the consistency check ran and it started as expected and everything seems to be back to normal. I’m chalking this failure up to randomness but if this starts to become an everyday thing then back to Best Buy the laptop will go. Although I’m not sure I want to let Geek Squad touch the machine because of all the horror stories I’ve heard out of there.

We shall see…