Bugzilla – Bug 331804
a suspended windows partition makes installation fail _after_ formatting disks.
Last modified: 2007-10-10 15:31:51 UTC
Background: I installed 10.3 on a box with an existing dual boot setup, and did a New Installation over the existing linux install, keeping its partitions. The windows partition was not resized or touched in any way. After having formatted /boot and /, the installation aborted because it was unable to mount the windows partition (mount point set to /windows/c as default), because the windows was suspended to disk. Because /boot was already gone, I had no bootloader with which to boot windows and shut it down normally. I had to repeat the installation and not assign windows a mount point to be able to proceed. If linux' NTFS driver can't mount a suspended windows partition, and doing this is critical to installation, the partition should be test-mounted before beginning the installation process and making any destructive changes, so the user can back out of the install and sort out the windows.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 309074 ***
To prevent abort of installation I now added code the mounts the partition readonly (using old ntfs) if a mount using ntfs-3g fails. Nevertheless this will lead to a system that will not boot properly since these ntfs-3g mounts will also be present in /etc/fstab. Nevertheless it should be easier to cope with this problem after install than after an aborted installation.