Ubuntu

Ubuntu seems to be corrupting my FAT32 disk

Asked by Horne

I'm a newbie to Ubuntu -- I installed it for the first time on my laptop a little less than a year ago, and it's been a self-taught crash course ever since. I really love Ubuntu, and Hardy has been performing wonderfully on my computer... until now.

I've partitioned my hard drive so that there's a partition for WinXP, Ubuntu, a swap partition for Ubuntu, and a FAT32 partition where I keep all the files that I want to use from Windows and Ubuntu. This system has worked well, except that I've noticed that the shared FAT32 drive seems to accumulate little .REC files over time. Until today, I didn't really pay any attention to this -- I figured this was Windows' chckdsk being hypersensitive to the way Ubuntu was using the disk or something. I didn't seem to be losing any data, and the .REC files always seemed to be 4K or less, so I just got used to deleting the files and ignoring the situation.

Today, though, I was rushing to complete a project on deadline. I had been working in Ubuntu on an MSWord file on my shared FAT32 partition in OpenOffice, and when I finished, I shut down Ubuntu. When I booted into WindowsXP later, the files I had been working on were gone. In fact, the directory looked exactly like a day or two ago, as if I had done nothing for the past day.

After freaking out, I booted into Ubuntu, installed magicrescue, and told it to scan the disk for OpenOffice files. It worked, thankfully, but afterwards I discovered that I seemed to have lost a lot of data. My the files for my e-mail program (Swiftdove) had apparently been corrupted, and magicrescue turned up far nearly ten megabytes of lost zip and openoffice files.

Fortunately I don't think I lost anything critical, and I've got a backup of most of this stuff on my external hard drive at home, but can someone help me figure out why Ubuntu and Windows won't play well together on the FAT32 partition? In the past I had tried formatting, running chkdsk, and everything else I could think of, but invariably after a few days, I would start to see .REC files all over my FAT32 disk.

I'd really like to keep a shared disk where Ubuntu and Windows can share files, but after losing this data, I'm really starting to worry that I can't do so safely. I'd appreciate any ideas or suggestions.

Thanks!
-Vysotsky

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Answered
For:
Ubuntu Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
unixchaos (jza873) said : 		#1

i dont know why this would happen. i dont run windows but i have a 300GB external drive and i never have any problems with it. did you try a different filesystem. ubuntu 8.04 can read ntfs and there is a way to make windows view ext2. what i would do is test it out with a flash drive and if it is corrupting fat32 partitions. try ntfs so you dont have to mod windows to make it work.

thats just a suggestion see if that helps

Revision history for this message
Horne (horne-b) said : 		#2

Thanks for the suggestion, Unixchaos. Things seem to have stabilized for the moment, so I'm going to keep an eye on the situation over the next few days. If I start to see Windows' chkdsk finding problems or if I find trouble when I run fsck, I'll try converting the partition to NTFS or Ext2 (which would be really cool if I can get Windows to recognize it!). I'll let you know what happens.

Thanks for replying so quickly, by the way. I really appreciate it.

Revision history for this message
unixchaos (jza873) said : 		#3

if this helps this is how to mount ext2/3 partitions in windows.
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2007/03/mount-ext2-or-ext3-partition-in-windows.html

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#4

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Needs information' state without activity for the last 15 days.

Revision history for this message
Horne (horne-b) said : 		#5

I've continued to have a few bumps with my shared FAT32 partition over the last month, and I think I've isolated the problem. It seems that the partition gets messed up when I hibernate in either Ubuntu or Windows and then boot into the other operating system. Would switching to NTFS or ext3 help prevent a problem if one OS is hibernating while the other accesses the shared partition?

Revision history for this message
arekkusu (arekkusu-r) said : 		#6

Interesting.

I have already heard about this hibernate into a system and then boot into another thing.
BUT I think it was for example hibernate windows and then touch the windows partition in Ubuntu with is not dangerous.
(when Windows hibernate it will leave the NTFS partition in an unclean state so that it will lead to problem if Ubuntu accesses it afterwards)

Now you said you separate shared partition is the problem... Windows should be using it's own partition for hibernation unless it has been setup otherwise... so I can't make sense of this. Hopefully someone can help you out.

In general though I don't recommend using FAT32... it isn't a really good filesystem. NTFS or Ext3 would be better choice.

Can you help with this problem?

Provide an answer of your own, or ask Horne for more information if necessary.

To post a message you must log in.