is it dangerous to force a mount?

[gusl]

Can anyone explain why XP doesn't offer "Remove Hardware Safely" for my external HD?

When I plug it into Knoppix, it mounts fine, but for read-only. When I unmount and try to mount it as read-write, it fails with approximately this message:

Mount denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:

Choice 1: If you have Windows, disconnect the external devices by clicking on 'Safely Remove Hardware'

Choice 2: you can use the 'force' option for your own responsibility. For example, type:

   mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 -o force

Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:

   /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 ntfs-3g force 0 0

Is it dangerous for me to force a mount?


also posted here.

Comments

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

In most cases it ought to be no more dangerous to force the mount on linux that it would be to plug it into Windows (which will mount it without a check). However, it's possible that Windows has a lot of logic in its NTFS driver for dealing with corruption (since it's so common, since Windows users don't know what mounting is) which the Linux NTFS driver lacks. So that could make force-mounting dangerous, in the sense that whatever corruption is present might be made worse if you write to the corrupted bits in Linux.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

That makes sense.
I'm inclined to write a really small thing at first, as a test.

How can I check for corruption?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Also, I'm pretty sure Windows wasn't writing to the external HD when I unplugged it. Could you still get corruption this way?