Windows 8 comes with a new feature called ‘fast start-up’ (also called ‘hybrid boot’), which is based on the ‘hibernation’ feature that came with older versions of Windows. ‘Hybrid boot’ lets Windows 8 to boot really fast, and it is also enabled automatically when you shut down your computer too.
If you dual boot your Windows 8 computer, say with Ubuntu, then with this feature comes a drawback as well. For example, after shutting down Windows 8, if the next time you boot into Ubuntu and tried to access Windows 8’s OS partition, then ‘Nautilus’ (file manager) will give you a warning saying that, that partition is hibernated etc and won’t let you mount it.
Not just in Windows 8, you will get this error message if you use Windows 7, Vista, XP and tried to access its NTFS partition after hibernating too. But if you use Windows 8, then you should see this quite often as hibernation (‘hybrid boot’) is enabled by default in Windows 8.
Because it is quite frustrating, if you have been looking for a way to permanent disable this error message and mount that partition, then this post is for you.
What are the options ?
Well, if you want to mount it in Ubuntu, then basically you have 4 options.
1. You can reboot back to Windows 8 and then choose ‘Restart’ as when restarting, Windows 8 automatically disables the so called ‘fast start-up’ feature.
2. Or, you can press and hold the ‘Shift’ key while choosing ‘Shut down’ in Windows 8 as this too disables the ‘fast start-up’ for that session.
3. Or, you can completely disable the ‘fast start-up’ feature of Windows 8.
4. Or, you can change a setting in Ubuntu so it will manually remove the ‘hiberfile.sys’ file on the OS partition, thus enabling you to access its data with read-write permissions.
As you can see, when considering everything, this fourth option is the best one. Also, Windows 8 unlike previous versions, does not save ‘user session’ data while shutting down, therefore, other than the delayed usual boot (‘cold boot’) you will not really lose anything either.
Lets do it …
For Ubuntu 12.10 users
Step 1:
Doing this in Ubuntu 12.10 (and newer) is very easy thanks to the changes that has landed into the disk manager. So first of all, search for below term in Unity’s dash and open the disk manager as shown below.
disks
Step 2:
Now choose your hard disk drive from the list to your left and from your right, choose the Windows 8’s OS partition. Usually the OS partition is the 2nd one, but that can change depending on your configuration.
Step 3:
Then, click on the small ‘gears’ icon below it and from the menu chose ‘Edit Mount options…’.
Step 4:
In the ‘Mount options’ window, make sure the ‘Automatic Mount Options’ setting (at the top) is turned off, otherwise you won’t be able to edit these settings.
After that, copy and paste the below code into the mount options field (shown below).
,remove_hiberfile
Step 5:
Now click on the ‘OK’ button at the bottom, and when asked, enter your user password (you have to have administrative privileges to do this). That’s it, now open ‘Nautilus’ file manager, click on the partition’s icon and it will be mounted without any errors!.
If you use Ubuntu 12.04 and below …
Step 1:
Open your Terminal window and enter the below command.
sudo mkdir /media/t
You can change ‘t‘ into any name you like.
Step 2:
Before we processed further, it is necessary for you to find the device id (or ‘device file’) assigned for the Windows 8’s OS partition. And finding the device id of that partition is very easy.
For that, enter the below command in your Terminal window.
sudo blkit
This will output a list of partitions and few of their details (‘Device file’, ‘Label’ and the file system used).
Step 3:
My output of this command is shown in the below screenshot (I have 4 partitions). The ‘device id’ of each partition is listed at the beginning of each line.
While installing Windows (Vista, 7 and 8), if there were no partitions on your HDD, then the setup first creates a small partition called ‘System Reserved’. Usually the partition next to it is Windows OS’s partition. But those can change according to your configuration.
So have a look at the output ‘blkit’ command gives you and identify the ‘device id’ of the partition where Windows 8 is installed, and copy it (in this example it is ‘/dev/sda2‘).
Step 4:
Now copy the below code and simply replace the ‘/dev/sda2‘ with the device id of your Windows 8’s OS partition (in ‘Step 1’ if you had chosen a different mount point, then make sure to replace that with ‘t’ as well).
/dev/sda2 /media/t ntfs-3g remove_hiberfile
Step 5:
Then open your Terminal and enter the below command.
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab
Step 6:
This will open a configuration file that lets you mount file system automatically at system’s start-up called ‘fstab’. Now go to an empty area and create a new line (by pressing the ‘Enter’ key) and simply paste the code in the ‘Step 4’ into that empty area, as shown below.
Then save your changes and close this file.
Now reboot your computer and from now on, you won’t be bothered by that annoying message while trying to mount Windows 8’s system partition in Ubuntu. That’s it!
Note: Not only if you dual boot with a GNU/Linux OS, according to this ‘Ghacks.net’ article, the ‘fast start-up’ can also corrupt your data on numerous other occasions too!. Hopefully Microsoft will work something out, till then, be careful.
53 Comments
o que deu certo no meu foi este diretamente pelo windows 8.Os outros não deram certo pelo Ubuntu 12.10.Thank you sorry for the English translator. Greetings from Brazil. Congratulations Hackerwirelles GG 56 AU. SOUTH AMERICA BRASIL
Hmm, that’s strange ‘Alexandre’, this works perfectly well in my Ubuntu 12.10. Oh, you’re welcome by the way :).
Eu estava sofrendo por causa disso e não achei nada em portuguẽs.Mas ai está um super usuário parabéns mesmo .Não sabes o quanto me ajudou.
Works just fine in 13.04. Thank you!
You’re welcome.
Waoooooo! this awesome. I have this issue for some time now. But I was thinking that its hardware issue. Thanks for the solution shall, i will try it out now!
You’re welcome!.
Hm, have a strange problem with my win8 partition… Look at http://askubuntu.com/q/300467/150981, remember to read comments too..
Cant find it anywhere, and Im sure it booted to win8 before “boot-repair” was used..
Hi Ronny,
I cannot say this for sure. But as I pointed out in this article, Windows 8 comes with a feature called ‘Hybrid Boot’. So what happens is that, if prior to installing Ubuntu, you had shutdown Windows 8 (rather than rebooting), then there’s a high possibility that Gparted (partition manager in Ubuntu) simply decided to not show the Windows 8 partition (again, just a guess though).
Since you don’t seem to care whether you lose data or not, the best thing to do is to, first disable ‘secure-boot’, then re-install Windows 8 & re-partition the whole disk.
Then, once you’re logged into Windows 8, rather than shutting it down, reboot it. Then when the PC reboots, boot into-it using the Ubuntu media (DVD/USB …) & try installing Ubuntu. If things go according to plan, you should see Windows 8 being recognized by the Ubuntu’s partition manager.
Please remember that I cannot test any of these as my notebook does not support these features.
I tried everything you said but I still can’t mount my Windows 8 partition.. I’m running Ubuntu 13.04
Hi ‘Nikola’,
That’s strange. What error do you get ?
Strangely now it works. I rebooted after doing your steps for Ubuntu 12.10 and newer, and now it works somehow. I’ll get back to you if it fails mounting it again.
Thanks for the fast response and your will to help out, cheers!
You’re welcome :).
It happened again, this is the error I receive http://oi40.tinypic.com/2mrtbht.jpg
Hi,
This error occurs while trying to mount NTFS partitions, other than the one where Windows 8 is installed. And the only way to bypass this error is by either booting into Windows 8 & select Rebooting or by using any other method that disables the ‘Hybrid Boot’ feature.
Or, you can also, as the error suggests, add ‘ro’ option in the ‘Disks’ utility for that partition & then you should be able to access it. If you do that however, then you will only be accessing it with read-only permissions.
Also please remember that, in this post, I wanted to show how to mount the Windows 8’s OS partition only, under Ubuntu.
Anyhow, although I cannot be certain about this, perhaps if you had mounted the Windows 8’s OS partition first (which removes the ‘hiberfile’) and then tried to mount other NTFS partitions, then you might not get this error. Again, it is only a suggestion.
So the next time, try that method (you’re more than welcome to let me know if it works 🙂 ).
P.S: I can’t test it out because due to a GPU driver issue (I think), ‘Hybrid Boot’ has stopped working on my Notebook PC.
Thanks again for fast response.
Well I get the same error with trying to mount Windows 8 partition 🙁
Anyways, I gave up and now I shut down Windows 8 while holding shift key and everything works like a charm 🙂
Thanks a lot for your support and fast responses! Cheers mate 🙂
:).
I have an EEEPC with Ubuntu 13.04 and Win8 evaluation.
And it does not let me boot Windows. I can use the ‘ro’ mount and can mount the volume read-only. Unfortunately, ‘remove_hiberfile’ does not work. And I need to be able to boot Win.
I read that this comand may do it : ‘mount -t ntfs-3g -o remove_hiberfile /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot-sav/sda1’
But I don’t know how to use this comand
Hi REM,
1. First of all, enter the below command (this creates a folder for mounting the paritition), oh and, you’ll need administrative privileges to do these.
sudo mkdir /mnt/temp2. The first partition is ‘sda1’, however, if the HDD was partitioned using Windows 7 or 8 installer, then the first paritition is not where Windows gets installed. So you should be mounting the ‘sda2’, if you haven’t changed anything else.
So to do that, enter the below command.
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g -o remove_hiberfile /dev/sda2 /mnt/tempAs you mentioned, since you can’t mount the windows parition, I’m not sure this will be of any help. Good luck.
Followed your instructions, i get the same error..
Thanks For your sugestion.. its helpfull
You’re welcome Ahmad.
Thank you very much! I was endlessly looking for a workaround. However, as I was testing, I found that you can’t move a file to trash(can only permanently) but maybe that’s just my case.
I used option 4 btw.
Ubuntu 13.04
You’re welcome.
You didn’t missed nothing in step 4? I think that “/dev/sda2 /media/t ntfs-3g remove_hiberfile” is not a sane terminal command… no?
Nope, command is correct 🙂 .
This does not work in Ubuntu 14.04
If you add “,remove_hiberfile” to the mount options in Disks and try and mount it it comes up with the same error about the partition being hibernated. So does this only work in Ubuntu 12.04?
I need to mount my Windows partition read/write, I cannot boot Windows and need to do it in Ubuntu. I am running Windows 8.1 which should be the same as 8.
Gayan, please tell me how to make this work.
Jake, did you reboot the PC after adding that line ? (you have to reboot the PC in order for the changes to occur). I’m currently using Linux Mint 17… so can’t test this out in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but I cannot see why it shouldn’t work in it…
Thanks for the reply,
Do you mean reboot Ubuntu? I am running a live USB so it probably won’t remember after the restart.
I cannot reboot Windows because it’s corrupted and won’t boot which I why I am trying to mount the drive in Ubuntu.
Ahh, there’n lies the problem. As far as I can see, there are two solutions. The first & probably the easiest is to create a new Live USB with ‘Persistent mode’ enabled (if you’re using Ubuntu for creating the live USB then enable and enter a preferred size under the option ‘Stored in reserved extra space’ of the Live Startup creator utility that comes with Ubuntu, you can achieve the same thing using other tools, they simply lists it differently). And then once you boot into the desktop change the mount option and reboot and from the next time you should be able to access the Windows partitions.
If it does not work or, you want to try the second method… just boot into a Live Ubuntu desktop using your existing USB drive and then,
*. Follow the steps listed in this article under the sub heading ‘If you use Ubuntu 12.04 and below …’
*. When you come to ‘Step 4’, add ‘sudo mount’ to the command that I have listed. For example, the command that you should now be using is:
P.S: I’ve slightly changed the above command.
Again, make sure to replace ‘/sda2’ accordingly.
Now open the mount point and you should be able to access the windows partition (follow the same steps for mounting other partitions as well). If the file manager gives you issues, then open it with root privileges using the below command.
sudo nautilusI hope this helps.
All persistant Ubuntu USB’s I make do not work. Either with Live Startup Creator or Linux Live USB Tool in Windows.
Because those programs do not format the USB correctly for use with UEFI & GPT. Only Rufus does it correctly but has no option for persistence.
All terminal command’s I have tried including the one you posted don’t work, it just says the same thing about it refusing to mount.
I’ve slightly changed the mount command of my above reply. Please try it now.
It came back listing examples of mount command usage, so the command was not recognised.
Sorry about that Jake, I edited the command again and now it should work. However, I just tested it on LM 17 and ‘ntfs-3g’ still failed to mount my Hibernated windows 8.1 partitions using this method. That said, on one occasion, after trying a few times, it suddenly mounted the Windows partition! (with read/write permissions). Then I rebooted the computer and tried to mount it again, but couldn’t do so afterwards. So I guess it’s probably an issue with the ‘ntfs-3g’ driver (just a guess).
Anyhow, there is another solution that works flawlessly. Have you ever heard of a tool called ‘Active@ Boot Disk’ ? It’s a utility (once installed into a CD or a USB) that lets you boot into a Windows live desktop session and from there you can deal with files just as you would do under a installed Windows operating system. And yes, it lets you copy/move files that are on hibernated partitions (I just tested it, to be sure).
There’s a free demo version which is free to use for 10 days, although there might be few limitations, I think it’ll give enough time for you to get out of this mess 🙂 . Below is the link.
http://www.lsoft.net/bootdisk.aspx
Hi Gayan,
Thanks for detailed explanations.
Unfortunatelly none of the options works for me – not even ‘Active@ Boot Disk’.
My PC (lenovo x1 carbon) simply cannot boot any windows from USB (i dont have a DVD reader).
Similar to Jake I was able to boot Ubuntu 14.04 from USB but from there no way to delete the hiberfile.sys. None of your suggestion or any other solutions on the web worked. I was able to read the files in read-only mode (using “sudo mount -o ro /dev/sda4 /home/win”) but I’m not able to recover my windows session.
Any guess what could I try next ? I feel that I need to find a way to delete that hiberfile.sys and everything will boot nicely.
Thanks,
Milovan.
Hi Milovan,
I actually don’t have Windows anymore and can’t actually test any of these anymore.
That said, if you’re able to boot using ‘Active@ Book Disk’, then try to run a ‘scan disk’ on Windows 8.1 partition first and then try to delete the ‘hyber.sys’ file. This is the only suggestion I have…
Thanks man worked like a charm…..Thanks a lot!!!!!
You’re welcome 🙂 .
Thank you so much!! I almost lost ALL my files…worked like a charm!
You’re welcome 🙂 .
Thank you so much. Windows 8 won’t boot and Linux Mint wouldn’t mount the drive. This worked a treat!
You’re welcome Sharon 🙂 .
Work in Ubuntu 14.04
Thank you
You’re welcome Yusuf.
Work in ubuntu 14.04 , Thanks so much !
You’re welcome Gabriel.
Works fine under Ubuntu 15.04.
Thanks a million
You’re welcome Maritz.