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Is there a way to fsck/chkdsk an NTFS drive from Linux?

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up vote 11 down vote accepted

Yes. This is handled by fsck on recent releases. If the partition is not listed in /etc/fstab, then you will likely need to tell it the partition type. I've used this from a Linux CD to recover a partition Windows wouldn't boot from.

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Although as noted in the man page for ntfsfix/fsck.ntfs, it is not a Linux version of chkdsk and only checks for certain kinds of obvious problems on the disk. – SabreWolfy Dec 19 '11 at 10:03
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I assume from the above comment that fsck.ntfs was at some point handled by ntfsfix. Comments on a lower post indicate this may not be workable now as their arguments are not compatible. Anyway, in Debian 8.2, fsck.ntfs does not exist - but ntfsfix does and was able to fix a corrupted MFT I encountered. Thanks @SabreWolfy for the hint. – underscore_d Nov 5 '15 at 23:24
up vote 5 down vote

Unfortunately the ntfsfix tool is very limited compared to Microsoft's chkdsk. Try to get a Windows install going - preferably with the newest version of Windows as Microsoft is presumably constantly improving chkdsk (I hope..) New versions of Windows are often available for free as trials. If the problem is in a USB disk you can try installing Windows in something like VirtualBox and give the VM control of the USB device.

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Or use Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. It's a live Windows XP CD with lots of recovery tools. That's how I solved my problem (corrupted NTFS partition). I tried using the ntfsck program included in the Parted Magic live USB, but I got an error saying Boot sector: bad NTFS magic. Segmentation fault. – dario_ramos Apr 30 '12 at 23:23
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maybe limited for some people, but it fixed my corrupted MFT just fine :-) [until the next time, perhaps! i'm not sure about this drive...] – underscore_d Nov 5 '15 at 23:22
    
UBCD has many qualities but I should not describe it as a Windows XP CD. – Graham Perrin Jul 16 '16 at 14:33
up vote 3 down vote

If you have NTFSProgs installed, you should be able to run fsck.ntfs or fsck -t ntfs to fsck an NTFS drive.

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Running Debian 6.0.3, just installed ntfsprogs, no fsck.ntfs installed, and when running fsck with -t ntfs, get "fsck.ntfs not found". So don't think the two are related. – Zayne S Halsall Dec 17 '11 at 15:00
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@ZayneSHalsall In Debian, it happens to be a symlink to ntfsfix which is in ntfsprogs. I guarantee you that you will be able to run ntfsfix if ntfsprogs installed properly. – squircle Dec 27 '11 at 5:51
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Newer versions of Debian and Ubuntu don't have this symlink. You can make it yourself, but the problem is that ntfsfix has a completely different set of arguments to the standard fsck ones. It's better to make fsck.ntfs (and fsck.ntfs-3) a script containing exec ntfsfix ${@:$#} (with a shebang of #!/bin/bash). – Neil Mayhew Mar 19 '15 at 22:31
up vote 2 down vote

ln -s /bin/ntfsfix /sbin/fsck.ntfs

fsck /dev/sdg1
fsck from util-linux 2.21.2
Mounting volume... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Checking the alternate boot sector... FIXED
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/sdg1 was processed successfully.

On fedora 22, there is another binary :

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 13 May 22 22:13 /usr/sbin/fsck.ntfs -> ../bin/ntfsck
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