Having issues with mounting NTFS partitons in Gutsy?

Your NTFS partition may not have been shutdown cleanly. Blame Windows.

After upgrading to Gutsy recently, I was annoyed with a particular, persistant problem, where my PC would continually run fsck (disc checking) on every reboot. Every reboot.

And it would hang at the disc checking stage for what seemed like an eternity. Now I’m not a patient person when it comes to PCs so I used Alt + Sys Rq + e (end all processes, nicely) to cancel the task so the init process could continue. There was nothing in the usual logs; dmesg, /var/log/fsck, etc. No reason as to why it would repeatedly get stuck on boot.

This went on for over two weeks until I decided to find out why this was happening. After starting Kubuntu in recovery mode, I watched the boot process up until the disc check; no problems. Then it tried to mount the local filesystem, which is when I saw the message.

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount ‘/dev/sdc1′: Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:
Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.
Choice 2: If you don’t have Windows then you can use the ‘force’ option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 -o force
Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:
/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 ntfs-3g defaults,force 0 0

Still being impatient, I tried searching for what to do, thinking about reporting a bug, going for broke and using the force option, until I realised it was right there in front of me.

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)

All I had to do was reboot into Windows and then restart the PC.

Cleanly.

So not using Alt+Ctrl+Del or the restart button, which was no mean feat as my Windows install is plagued and dying a slow painful death. Fortunately the PC did restart and mounting the NTFS partition is now right as rain.

(Again I’m wondering why I even keep it around at all?)

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