Is there anyway to unlock hibernated NTFS partition?

Question

A broken driver messed things up, and Windows 8.1 won’t boot even into safe mode. Fixboot didn’t change a thing. When I try to restore using a saved recovery point, Windows tells me that partition is locked and there is nothing it could do about it.

I booted up an Ubuntu live environment, which told me that I only can mount this partition in read-only mode, because it was hibernated. Googling “unlock hibernated ntfs” led me to an only solution, which I am not sure I am capable to use.

Can I somehow force the mount with writing permissions, disregarding the supposed state of hibernation?

P.S. Using read-only mount, I have already backed up all sensible information, so I don’t care if this mounting violence breaks things.

Solution

use ntfs-3g command with remove_hiberfile option .

You need to mount the partition in read-write mode and are not able to or willing to boot into Windows. so, it is not included here because it completely deletes hiberfil.sys and will cause you to lose all unsaved information in the hibernated Windows programs. The following is a quotation from man ntfs-3g about the remove_hiberfile option that would be used to do this.

remove_hiberfile

Unlike in case of read-only mount, the read-write mount is denied if the NTFS volume is hibernated. One needs either to resume Windows and shutdown it properly, or use this option which will remove the Windows hibernation file. Please note, this means that the saved Windows session will be completely lost. Use this option under your own responsibil‐ity.

Comments

[Giacomo1968]

This stinks. But I assume the question and answer thread here was not helpful, correct?