Vista crashes Linux filesystem when hibernating

[Stefan]

To reproduce, do the following:

What you need:
Notebook with one internal hard disk.
An external USB Harddrive.

Install:
Install Windows Vista to the Laptop's one internal hard drive.
Get Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 Desktop.
Install Ubuntu in the way i did, as described in:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=576648

Then apply the latest updates.
Restart.

Now boot from the USB drive,
GRUB should show up.
Select Windows Vista.

Vista starts.

Log in to vista, do some work/nothing.

Now tell Vista to hibernate.
Vista won't hibernate, just show you the login screen after appx. 5 seconds.

The only thing you can do now is log in to Vista again. Shut it down.
So far so good. Stand-by works, hibernate doesn't.
Well, one could just stand-by instead of hibernating, so far nothing to worry about.

But: once windows has hibernated, it screwed up the file system on the USB drive.
It will very likely be impossible to boot Ubuntu, you can very likely not even boot 'till the command line.

If you're lucky and can boot to the command line, you can't repair the filesystem with fsck, if throws some error.

The only thing I still could do is to start a live CD or boot vista, and rescue the remaining data.
Though, some of the data on the drive will be partially missing...
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Looks like Windows writes hibernating info to the primary boot drive (USB), and that overwrites data at more or less arbitrary locations. In this case boot data and part of the kernel, as well as part of the file system...

If that's the case I think GRUB should somehow tell Windows that the primary boot drive it should use is the respective HD, and NOT the Linux filesystem on the USB drive (which is set primary boot drive in the BIOS...)
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Well, once you know that, just don't hibernate, but Windows can hibernate automatically, once inactive for a user specified time... And I don't think deactivating hibernate is a solution.
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It would also be nice if someone could tell me whether the issue i described at:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=576648
is because GRUB or the kernel mixes HD numbers up, or whether that is a fault caused by me due to wrong settings.

[Sense Egbert Hofstede (sense)]

Isn't this a bug in Vista? I don't think GRUB can communicate with Vista.
By the way, does this bug still happens at Gutsy Gibbon or Hardy Heron?
Thanks.

[Stefan (quandary)]

It does in Gutsy Gibbon. I'm on Hardy Heron now, but I don't know whether it still happens, and since I have not backed up my data yet, I do not intend to try it out anytime soon...

Yes, it might also be a bug in Vista. But Vista operates correctly when it's own boot manager manges the boot sequence, so the bug only happens with GRUB, at least for me.

[Jerone Young (jerone)]

This has nothing to do with Grub. All grub does is pass control to the windows boot loader. But Windows Vista screwing around with the USB filesyetm, is a Vista issue (maybe you have Vista's ReadBoost on) .

[Jerone Young (jerone)]

This has nothing to do with Grub. All grub does is pass control to the windows boot loader. But Windows Vista screwing around with the USB filesyetm, is a Vista issue (maybe you have Vista's ReadBoost on) .

[Stefan (quandary)]

I just reinstalled everything (including Vista - without updates) and checked.
Doesn't happen anymore. At least not on Debian Lenny.

Appears to have been a bug in Grub (- or a bug in a windows update) non-the-less...

No, ReadBoost is off.

Anyway, issue no longer of concern.