Mounting an unclean NTFS file system

{{< image src="/img/ntfs-image.png" alt="NTFS" position="center">}}

I'm dual booting between RHEL 8 and Windows 10 and the NTFS drive I use to share data between my two operating systems was suddenly mounted Read Only on Linux.

While trying to mount the drive again, I was facing the following message:

[root@rhel8 mnt]# umount -l /dev/sda1
[root@rhel8 mnt]# mount -t ntfs-3g -o rw /dev/sda1 /mnt/data
The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
or fast restarting.)

I don't use hibernation in Windows and fast restarting is definitely turned off. I didn't put Windows to sleep either, so I'm not sure where this is coming from at this point, but since I needed to write to the disk I needed an immediate fix without rebooting.

To fix the issue, I need the ntfsfix application:

[root@rhel8 ~]# dnf whatprovides ntfsfix
Updating Subscription Management repositories.
ntfsprogs-2:2017.3.23-11.el8.x86_64 : NTFS filesystem libraries and utilities
Repo        : epel
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/bin/ntfsfix

[root@rhel8 ~]# dnf install -y ntfsprogs

Then I ran ntfsfix against /dev/sda1:

[root@rhel8 ~]# ntfsfix /dev/sda1
Mounting volume... The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
FAILED
Attempting to correct errors... 
Processing $MFT and $MFTMirr...
Reading $MFT... OK
Reading $MFTMirr... OK
Comparing $MFTMirr to $MFT... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Setting required flags on partition... OK
Going to empty the journal ($LogFile)... OK
Checking the alternate boot sector... OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/sda1 was processed successfully.

That's it, the system then mounted the disk according to the options I've specified in /etc/fstab and I can now write again to my NTFS disk.