Can this disk be repaired? Does it need to be?

[Ben Scott]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 12:24 PM, Bruce Labitt <bdlabitt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Have an SSD formatted to NTFS.  I had intended to
> use it between linux and Win7 as a backup.  It
> worked for a while in both OS.  Yesterday Win7 asked
> if I wanted to repair the disk.

  Windows unfortunately confounds "disk", "partition", and
"filesystem", so it's difficult to know exactly what this is referring
to.

  If this really is just a backup, there should be no unique data on
this disk.  That is, you could smash the disk up with a hammer, and
not lose anything.

  If that is *not* the case -- if there *is* data that exists *only*
on this disk -- the first thing you should do is make a backup copy of
that data, to another disk/location.  You should be doing this anyway,
as data storage can fail at any time.

  (I suggest having multiple backup copies for most cases.  It's
difficult to have too many backups.)

  Once you're confident all the data is safe, I would look at the logs
on the Windows system that complained.  Open the "Event Viewer" tool
on the Window system.  If it's Vista or later, look under
"Administrative Events".  Look for errors/warnings around the time
Windows asked if you wanted to repair.  See if you can figure out if
this was a problem with the physical device, or the filesystem on the
device.  If you're not sure, post copies of the error messages.

  If I had to guess, I would say it sounds like logical corruption of
the filesystem.  Hardware trouble is more likely to make *both* Linux
and Windows complain.  Conversely, if Linux's NTFS implementation
handles something differently than Windows, Linux may not see a
problem, while Windows is choking.

  However, sometimes one OS will be more tolerant of a hardware
problem or idiosyncrasy, so one can't really rule that out at this
stage, either.

> Is this fixable?

  Depends on what the problem is.  And we haven't even touched root cause yet.

-- Ben