LarsBlog

No software is perfect I suppose. I've been using ext2IFS on my laptop without a single problem for a couple of years to allow my linux ext3 partition to be accessible from windows. So I thought I'd do the same with my dual-booting set up on my new desktop. However about once a month I've had a blue-screen of death, often when performing heavy disk operations on my ext3 partition from windows. Sometimes the computer starts to grind to a halt just prior (the mouse movement even gets choppy).

I've been able to tell it's the ext2IFS driver on some occassions because the filename actually appears on the blue-screen of death. Other times, I've had to analyse the minidump logs using the Microsoft Debugging Tools to determine that it was ext2IFS.

After each blue-screen, I perform a fsck on the partition from linux to make sure there are no file-system errors:

sudo fsck -C -a -V  /dev/sda5

Yet the problem recurrs. I've even been very careful to make sure I don't change between linux and windows when one of them is hibernated. So currently, I'm in the process of doing a non-destructive (ie read-only) bad-block check on my partition from Ubuntu - using:

sudo badblocks -sv /dev/sda1 

If my hard-drive doesn't show any problems, it's time to move all my data off this partition and reformat it to NTFS.

Dark times.