Can't access Windows drive: “Windows is hibernated, refused to mount”

Question

I'm using Fedora 20 along with Windows 8. However, I'm unable to access the contents of the drive in which Windows 8 is installed. It shows:

Error mounting /dev/sda2/
The NTFS partition is in unsafe state
Windows is hibernated, refused to mount

even though I had shutdown the Windows properly.

Answer 1

First, make sure you have cleanly shutdown windows and have not hibernated it.

According to the ntfs-3g manual, there is an option that allows you 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 responsibility.

So, I stress that this will destroy any unsaved data that is in the hibernated Windows session. If that is not an issue for you, you should be able to access the drive by running:

sudo ntfs-3g -o remove_hiberfile /dev/sdXN /path/to/mount

Change sdXN to your windows partition (e.g. /dev/sda1) and /path/to/mount to the actual path you want to mount to.

That should mount the drive correctly and since it will delete the hibernated session file, it should mount normally from now on.

Answer 2

Windows is hibernated, refused to mount

Chances are that Windows really is hibernated. Windows does this automatically when you tell it to shutdown normally. The benefit is that you get a faster apparent start-up time.

To shutdown Windows without hybernating, issue the following at a command-prompt (in Windows):

shutdown /s

You might also want include /t 0 for immediate shutdown.

I found a nice tutorial to set up a launcher for this: How to Do a Full Shutdown in Windows 8 Without Disabling Hybrid Boot.