Hibernate will cause data loss on shared partitions with dual boot

[Kurt J. Bosch]

Binary package hint: acpi-support

When hibernating Ubuntu while some (shared) partition is mounted it seems to be possible to boot the machine into some other 'OS' :) which can write to the same partition. (dual boot) This will lead to severe data loss on that partition.
This is a scenario which I think is quite offen used out there. There is at least one guy that I know who was bitten by this on _two_ machines using dapper.
I wrote some scriptlets that do the following:
(1) try to umount all partitions not essential for ubuntu
(2) roll back hibernate in case this is not possible (open files etc.)
(3) mount partitions again on resume

(There are still some BUGs inside:
  - should handle partitions without proper fstab entry too
  - should run only when suspend to disk not when suspend to ram
  - should display some message to the user when aborting
)

I tried hibernating on up to date feisty without this and with some file open on FAT partition and it seemed not to try umount nor doing anything to prevent me from running into this.

Additionally I think there should be a big/fat warning during installation to tell the user to use hibernation with extreme care on the other OS (or better disable it) if the is such one installed.

[Kurt J. Bosch (kujub-deactivatedaccount)]

Attached scripts (three in one file)

[Peter Whittaker (pwwnow)]

I'm closing this as "not a bug" (marking as rejected) as there is no effective way to prevent potential data loss when hibernating then booting into some other OS. Please refer to bug #80997 for more information and rationale.

It doesn't matter if the partitions in question are FAT or ext, whether the OS is Linux, Windows, or BSD: If you hibernate the machine then boot another OS, all partitions are fair game (there are ext drivers for Windows) and any files open on any of those partitions by any process, including the kernel or user space apps, are subject to possible corruption and data loss.

If you think there are effective of managing this, please consider writing a spec - any changes required to address this will touch a lot of code, and tracking this requires something more than a simple bug report.

Thanks!

[Kurt J. Bosch (kujub-deactivatedaccount)]

OK, wrote spec:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/prevent-dual-boot-on-hibernation