Hibernating and booting into another OS: will my filesystems be corrupted?
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IMPORTANT If you came here looking for an answer to this question, please read all the answers below. There are some testimonials from people who have lost data doing this. If you plan to do this

Short answer is: yes, as soon as more than one OS mounts a file system in read-write mode.

The kernel of a modern OS (I am generously including Windows here) caches file system data structures in memory. When you hibernate the computer, the content of that memory is written into a large file because that speeds-up a later restart.

Now, if you boot up another OS, and modify these partitions (without mounting them read-only), you alter the file systems data structures. That happens already when you view folders because this modifies access times stored in the inodes.

When you now shut down the second OS, and resume the first OS, the restarted kernel will have and use cached file system metadata which id loaded from the image into the kernel, that does not match that of the files on disk. And this causes file system corruption by definition.

  • RoadTrain@lemdro.idEnglish
    72·
    1 day ago

    So, in fact, the short answer is no.

    The answer is only yes if the question is “Hibernating and booting into another OS and modifying the same partition externally: will my filesystems be corrupted?”.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
      21·
      23 hours ago

      As I wrote above, for any safe access the file systems need to be mounted read-only (which is not the default). Otherwise, listing or viewing a file or directory already changes its metadata.