Xfce Forum

hugo-arg

Member

Registered: 2021-01-15

Posts: 1

Problems with windows formats in thunar.

Good afternoon friends of the community. I am writing to you from Argentina. Sorry for my English. I am new to linux, I use Linux Mint XFCE desktop and I use Thunar, all excellent; until I make use of a pen drive that had files that were recorded in windows 7 (in NTFS format); I used it well and it worked well, but one day it gave me an error and some files were overwritten, and, for example, world files appear like: "wfhwq34uitg35ut45guvfsdgvger54uogy54", on the page. So I have two questions:
1- can the information from those files be recovered? Or is already lost.
2- Is it advisable to use, yes or yes, the EXT4 format on pendrives in Linux?

Thank you very much

mint4all

Member

From: off the map

Registered: 2018-08-21

Posts: 276

Re: Problems with windows formats in thunar.

Greetings to you, and welcome to this forum!

First, a word of caution: do not use this pen drive (thumb drive / usb drive?) for now, before repairing it. I am saying this because i learned the hard way that NTFS-support in Linux is near-perfect for reading, but has its problems when writing back to intfs (any version). I have migrated a fair number of systems (laptops, desktops, thin clients) from win-xp, -vista, -7, -8 and -10 to ubuntu-based mint-xfce4 (32 & 64bit), and the lesson i learned was: 1) repair ntfs paritions under its native version of windows (xp on xp, 7 on 7, 8 on 8 and so on). Difficult if one has to work with a non-bootable, or corrupted win-system, but one can usually find one that still boots (friend, neighbor, school buddy) in order to repair a corrupted pen/usb drive.

In my experience, your files have not yet been overwritten, only their directory info got messed up. Win's chkdsk can fix that. As an alternative, there are a number of system-repair disks one can buy (some free, some for-pay), and they work quite well and often can do tricks that surpass win's chkdsk.

The ext4 format always worked perfect for my and my friend's pen/usb drives PROVIDED one remembers to first "unmount" and then "eject"; in my experience, if such a drive gets popped out prematurely, ext4's control blocks  or user permissions may get messed up -- a universal problem with writable+removable media.

And for those linux users that prefer dual-booting win/linux and automatically mount the ntfs partitian (perhaps to symlink to nfts-files (ie firefox & thunderbird profiles) they risk ntfs corruptions if they ever have to shutdown a stuck linux session via the power-button (aka hard reset). After having dealt with many problems of that sort, my approach is: lift the nfts-located data/files you'll ever need, or some useful salvage (ie fonts), onto an ext4 partition (or any other modern linux files syem), then get rid of the ntfs partition altogether. And -- in my opinion -- that goes for pen/usb drives as well.

I wish you good luck!
Cheers, m4a

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