Windows 7 committed Wubicide. How do I avoid it in the future?

Question

So, bit of background first.

I have an Asus laptop with two partitions on the same disk, C: (OS) and D: (Data). I'd set all of my Windows default folders (documents, downloads, &c) to live on D: because it's much bigger.

Then I decide that I'm going to slowly move toward Linux while keeping Windows for the utility stuff I still need for work (like Civ5). I install Ubuntu on D:\ubuntu - bearing in mind there's still a lot of other D:* stuff, since I want to be able to access documents that I've stored there both in Windows and Ubuntu.

That install worked fine at first...I got everything installed that I needed to in order to be able to be using Ubuntu about 90% of the time I was using my machine. That lasted about five days. At one point, while I was using Windows, I got a notice that there were updates that needed installing; I let them install while I was shutting out of Windows.

When I restarted, I knew I should boot Windows first because it had to finish configuring updates. I got a notice that there may be some disk corruption on D:, and the menu wouldn't really let me go farther without running sandisk. That ran, I booted into Windows, let the updates finish, shut down again, tried to boot Ubuntu and got error messages which eventually led me to things like this: How do I remove the extra Ubuntu option on the Windows Boot Manager menu?

When I eventually booted Windows, I found everything (including the previously-mentioned Windows default folders) gone from D:. 100% free disk space, no backup, apart from the fact that most important files there were already Dropbox'd.

Now, I want to reinstall Ubuntu, and if possible, to have Windows go back to the practice of storing data on D: so I can access it while using either OS, but for safety's sake, I moved all those default folders back over to their normal locations on C:. I'm willing to give that up if that's what caused the problem (if anything, it might accelerate my departure from Windows), but most importantly, I don't want to go and do all of this just to have Windows wipe the slate clean again.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Relevant part:

Corrupted NTFS filesystem

All reported cases of damaged filesystems were from users who hard rebooted (pulling the plug).

When you hard reboot, there is always a chance of damaging your filesystem, whether you use Wubi or not.

New users, unfamiliar with a new operating system, tend to hard reboot more often than necessary when they encounter problems.

If Wubi becomes damaged as a result of a hard reboot, there is a chance that Windows may also become corrupted since the principle behind Wubi is that of a virtual disk within the host operating system.

Sometimes people blame Wubi for these issues even though a quick Google search will reveal numerous cases of NTFS corruption without users having ever installed Wubi or ntfs-3g (and a full software industry lurking on that…).

If the NTFS filesystem becomes corrupted you need to run chkdsk /r from the Windows Recovery Console on the Windows CD (or other recovery CD available on the web) or in the msdos console (if you can boot into Windows).

At the moment there is no fsck for NTFS on the Linux side, otherwise it would be possible to fix these errors automatically within Linux itself, without having to rely on Windows tools.

The best advice is to simply avoid hard rebooting, whatever OS you may be using.

This means that even if you didn't used WUBI, your disk might fail if you perform the same action you did.