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Hibernating and booting into another OS: will my filesystems be corrupted?

Hibernating and booting into another OS: will my filesystems be corrupted?

If you came here looking for an answer to this question, please read all the answers below. There are some testimonials from people who have lost data doing this. If you plan to do this regularly, I highly recommend that you test for yourself.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 243
Total answers/comments: 5
Guest [Entry]

"Booting Windows over an hibernated Linux is not a good idea. I just lost 20 GiB of data in a shared NTFS partition...

I hibernated Ubuntu Lucid one day, and the next I fired up my computer. Some update messed up the saved option in Grub, so instead of booting Ubuntu again as it should, it started Windows 7. When I came back with my coffee, I just went on using it without recalling Ubuntu was in bear mode. I probably accessed music, Firefox profile, documents, downloads and games from the shared partition.

The next time I switched to Ubuntu, I saw the ""waking up from hibernation"" message. Dang. But I expected it to fail at waking, and soft reboot instead, as happened the previous time I ""tried"" this (in my Karmic times). But no, it woke up alright. Cool. Or not. I quickly realized a directory in the root of the shared partition was now empty. I think the only programs accessing the shared partition on resuming were Quod Libet (music player) and Transmission (bittorrent client).

I went back to Windows, where I couldn't even open the directory. Trying to ""dir"" it in shell produced ""file not found"". Corrupted. Still, the partition's free space had not increased, so my 20 GiB where probably still there, safe from being overwritten. Maybe.
But how to get to them?

A little research provided little help, and made my hopes even more bleak.

I ran Scandisk (""Check for Errors"") without auto repair, since I don't wanted to risk it fixing things by further destroying my data. The result was not very informative: ""Errors found. Run with auto repair."" Unknown to me, seemingly it also marked the partition to be automatically checked on next boot. I powered off and went away, and came back with EasyRecovery later.

The computer started with me not paying attention, as usual, and when I looked, chkdsk was already spewing errors in full swing, which it did for some ten minutes. Oh well, here goes nothing.

Fortunately I did lit a candle for Santa Tecla recently, and after Windows started, my data was back, all of it as far as I can tell, though some files ended up in found.000.

So yes, this had a happy ending. You'll forgive the dramatic suspense, but that's to drive a point across: backup your data! And (in my case) keep the backup up to date! And of course, be extra careful with hibernation and shared partitions..."
Guest [Entry]

"I regularly hibernate my Windows XP and boot over USB into Ubuntu.
Works flawlessly.

There is a difference between 'Standby' mode and 'Hibernate' mode.
The OS state is completely flushed to the disk and your hardware is powered off.
If you power up the machine and boot into some other OS, it has no impact on the hibernated OS.
You can keep as many OS'es hibernated as you want.

As an example,
You could have multiple Ubuntu installations (say, one per USB flash drive),
And, hibernate each, unplug the drive, and boot into another one.
There is no edge here because there is no stacking/chaining effect.
The hibernated USB sticks in this examples are all independent of each other
(across a power-cycled machine).

One small downside of a hibernated ""C:\"" drive and booting into another OS is,
you would not be able to mount the hibernated boot partition in the new OS.
The partition is locked with hibernation.
It will be corrupted if edited in that state."
Guest [Entry]

Just ran into an issue on a shared physical drive (FAT32) between Windows XP and Windows 7. I hibernated Windows XP, booted into Windows 7 for a few days, then went back to XP. Now I have a corrupt file system on the shared drive. Disk Checker is running, and it looks pretty bad. Mostly cross linked files though, but thousands of them.
Guest [Entry]

"This is kinda old, but being a critical issue, another testimonial is worth it.

I have an external NTFS USB hard drive that I'm using for data (no OS-related files) with 2 different PCs. I used to get constant data loss on it until I isolated the problem. One of the PCs is rather old and slow (Windows XP) so I was using hibernate for faster restart times, disconnecting the hard drive while in that state and writing data with the other PC (Windows 7). Data loss was not occurring every time but it was definitely caused by this scenario. Since I stopped doing it, it never happened again."
Guest [Entry]

"I ran into problems with hibernate and multi-booting.
Situation: Ubuntu and WinxP Multboot but the data partition visible for both OS.
I did some testing... back and forth...
So I was editing a Wordfile with Word... Saved the file and closed Word.
Hibernated... started Ubuntu... edited the same file with OpenOffice... hibernated.

Rebbooted to the hibernated WinXP. Word did NOT 'see' the changes... It simply loooked like another file...

I also did this testing the other way around...
Second time file was corrupted... I could not open the file or delete the file
Chkdsk 'solved' the problem but the file was lost...
In another test Ubuntu did not even see the edited file.

SO when using hibernation and the same partitions (does NOT need to be the partition where the OS boots from...) ist is very dangerous... Files can and will corrupt in my tests and I can repeat it...
BTW: In my tests I ALWAYS saved the file and closed the application (Word and OpenOffice) befre going into hibernate...!!
I thought mounting the partition was the culprit but now I think the problem must be something about file-caching or whatever...
Anyhow: Be careful with multi-OS-hibernation...!!
Regards, ArnoR"