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I've copied pictures from my Slackware/Linux computer to an external NTFS hard drive many times before. The NTFS device is mainly used on Windows computers. It has worked very well until the latest time I copied files. Now Windows systems are unable to mount the drive. Instead, Windows suggests formatting the device. Nevertheless, the drive is perfectly mountable on my Linux machines. I suppose the cause of the problem is similar to: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/60310/how-should-i-prevent-data-corruption-on-an-ntfs-partition-shared-by-windows-and

My question is how to make the device mountable on Windows. The simplest way would perhaps be to make a backup and then format the device. This is however probably impossible or at least impractical since the hard drive is bigger than my computer hard drive. Is there any quick fix? What commands can be used to solve the problem? Is it possible to fix the problem on a Windows machine?

Now I've learned that using NTFS file systems on multiple OSes should be avoided. I suppose FAT-systems is the best option?

Thanks in advance for help!

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    Have you tried using fsck on the drive as mentioned here: superuser.com/questions/233700/fsck-an-ntfs-drive-in-linux
    – D34DM347
    Commented Jan 11, 2017 at 13:27
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    Well, first thing first: Do you have any backup? If not, you really, really should set up a backup solution before you start messing around with the file system. A single copy of data is always at risk, and recovery tools (including fsck) only exacerbate that risk.
    – user
    Commented Jan 11, 2017 at 13:31
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    Short answer: yes, make a backup first. After you've done a backup, try chkdsk from Windows on the problematic drive given that it is readable from Linux the damages should not be very severe.
    – Andrea Lazzarotto
    Commented Jan 11, 2017 at 16:31
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    @AndreaLazzarotto Woth mentioning that you can run chkdsk on the UUID of the drive in windows, since OP is not able to mount the drive on windows
    – MrPaulch
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 12:36
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    You might want to use exFAT if you want a modern file system with high compatibilities among operating systems. NAS stands for "network attached storage", there is nothing preventing you from using one in a LAN (actually, it's quite common).
    – Andrea Lazzarotto
    Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 15:49

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