Mounting Windows 8 NTFS partition

Recently I installed Windows 8 side by side to my Arch installation. When I was using Windows 7, I could mount my NTFS partitions without any problem, but not when I have Windows 8. The reason is, Windows 8 is locking it’s partitions when shutting down, just like when Windows 7 does when Hibernating. (This is a clue that Windows 8 is not doing a full Shutdown, but doing a variation of Hibernation.)

Because of this reason, normal mounting command is not working. Specially when the partition is mounted in fstab. Here is a fix I came up with.

Please note you still cannot mount the partition using fstab. But I created a simple bash script and started that at start-up.

That hibernation lock can be removed by ntfsfix command as below. (/dev/sda3 is the target ntfs partition)

sudo  ntfsfix /dev/sda3

Then you can simply mount that partition as usual.

sudo  mount /dev/sda3 /media/praneeth/GnomezGrave

Or you can create a simple bash script with those commands.

#!/bin/bash
sudo  ntfsfix /dev/sda3
sudo  mount /dev/sda3 /media/praneeth/GnomezGrave

And use a proper way to run that in startup. (ex: /etc/profile)

Cheers..!!

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