Yesterday I mounted my windows partition (dual-boot, single HD) as /mnt/windows. Today when I booted up I got a message "Can't open mtab for writing: Stale NFS file handle." I can't mount the windows partition and can only login as root. I tried to open the mtab file but it would not open. The directory listing shows ???? where the file information should be.

The hard drive is located within the computer not on a network, so it seems the NFS message is in error, but something is wrong with the mtab file. I have not found any way to fix it.

Please see here how to submit a bug report, so we could help you: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#bugreport

This morning I booted up in linux (Fedora 9) and the situation was the same as yesterday--no mounting Windows partition, stale NFS file handle message. I then rebooted in Windows, did a little work there, shut down and rebooted in Fedora. Suddenly the problem was solved--no error messages and there was my windows files. So the problem seems to have corrected itself after multiple reboots. Thanks for your prompt reply anyway.

Mike

This the full error message:

mount: can't open /etc/mtab for writing: Stale NFS file handle

which means the problem is not with ntfs-3g but with the 'mount' command from the util-linux-ng package. The issue didn't fix itself and doesn't have connection with Windows but it's random.

Please report it to Red Hat at https://bugzilla.redhat.com

Regards, Szaka