proceed with caution:  only recommend it to be applied to filesystems that are for backup purpose (of which another copy exist).

“ntfsfix tool is very limited compared to M$s chkdsk”

using a NVMe as backup “USB STICK” and rsynced a lot of files to it. (because slow backups suck X-D)

but something went wrong (no clean sync? no clean unmount?)

it would not mount.

su - root
mount /dev/sdb1 /media/user/sdb1
$MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0).
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.

so tried this:


hostnamectl | grep Op; # tested on
  Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
ln -s /bin/ntfsfix /sbin/fsck.ntfs
fsck /dev/sdb1
fsck from util-linux 2.36.1
Mounting volume... $MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0).
FAILED
Attempting to correct errors... 
Processing $MFT and $MFTMirr...
Reading $MFT... OK
Reading $MFTMirr... OK
Comparing $MFTMirr to $MFT... FAILED
Correcting differences in $MFTMirr record 0...OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Setting required flags on partition... OK
Going to empty the journal ($LogFile)... OK
Checking the alternate boot sector... OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/sdb1 was processed successfully.

it worked this time 😀

was able to mount and read the files again 😀

and they computed happily ever after…

realizing, they would not have needed NTFS in the first place, because the workstation is dual boot GNU Linux + Windows 😀

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