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I dual boot Ubuntu 9.10 beta and Windows 7 RTM. After having run Windows 7 for a while this evening, I booted into Ubuntu and copied two files into my home directory. One was ~50mb and the other was ~500mb or so.

When I rebooted into Windows and tried to log in, I recieved some variation on the following message:

C:\Users\James is not accessible.

The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

(It also mentions either explorer.exe or unreg2mp.exe, depending. It disappears before I can write it all down.)

I assume Linux must have done something screwy when copying the file. I mean, I've used NTFS support hundreds of times in the past, but bugs are everywhere, right?

I got dumped to a temporary desktop where I ran "ckdsk /f" and rebooted. chdsk mentioned several errors with file 25 (Is that a MFT? The number seems small enough to be one.)

After the scan finished, I tried to log in again. Same error, dumped back to temporary desktop. Crap.

What's the best way to fix this? All my important stuff is backed up by Dropbox, but reinstalling everything would be a pain.

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Is the directory still readable from your Ubuntu install? If not, does "dmesg | tail" report something? – Bobby Oct 22 '09 at 13:31
did you ever get this fixed? presumably by now you've updated to Ubuntu 9.10's normal release from the Beta, so i'm suggesting this be closed as no longer relevant. – quack quixote Jan 5 '10 at 11:48
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closed as off topic by quack quixote, Diago Jan 5 '10 at 12:31

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1 Answer

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Shot in the dark here, but could you use a Linux LiveCD to boot up and backup any files you need?

I've done a bit of googling for "error with file 25" and most of the relevant results speculate it could be a virus

This link may help.

Otherwise, I'd suggest doing a fresh install, keep OS on C: drive and any programs/games/personal files etc on a D: drive or separate partition.

Hope this helps

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Linux viruses do exist now. – harrymc Oct 22 '09 at 12:36
@harrymc: They've always existed, but they're all more or less proof-of-concept...and as someone in the ubuntuusers.de community said "Viruses under Linux are like meteors, you hear sometimes that here and there crashed one down, but you never see one yourself". – Bobby Oct 22 '09 at 13:30
I can still read the filesystem from Linux; I just can't get Windows to play nicely with it. I also doubt I've nabbed a virus; the turnover on packages in the Ubuntu beta is fairly rapid, and it's much more likely that I triggered an obscure bug. I've already backed up everything and am preparing to do a reinstall. Putting stuff on a separate partition wouldn't be much less of a hassle; it'd still have gotten corrupted and I'd still have to restore from backup. Reinstalling Windows is fairly painless; it's restoring all the apps that takes a while. :-P – JamesGecko Oct 24 '09 at 0:04
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