Ubuntu 16.04, windows 10, fast boot and hibernate

Question

Ladies and gentlemen, hello.

I've been running W10 and Ubuntu for a moment now and it's time for my annual full clean up day. Everything were more or less fine but I was a bit bothered about start up time, and as I am the kind of wanting best of all worlds, I want to give a try on an improved environment. Note that this question will not be about general installation method, I'm fine on that.

My current setup is W10/Ubuntu 14.04/exFat Data partition, without any hibernation/fast boot.

I would like to move on the follow setup : W10/Ubuntu 16.04, without any shared partition, and with W10 fast boot and Ubuntu hibernate (after testing my computer compatibility with $sudo pm-hibernate). I intend instead to have Windows and Ubuntu have their own Data folder on /, C:/ (I already have external HDD for saves). I use few data space, mostly for studies, and have no problem having a data duplicate on HDD

I have therefore three questions related to this setup idea :

-> I read that Fast boot save Windows state in a .sys file, creating conflicts which I experienced myself (oh dear, thanksfully I do regular external saves). But as long as Windows and Ubuntu does not share any partition, do I risk anything ?

-> Is there a way that Windows hibernated NTFS partition can be read (not written) so I can retrieve data to make a copy on my Ubuntu ? And the other way around ?

-> My computer should be sufficient to run Ubuntu on a VM. In case previous idea is impossible, is it possible to have Ubuntu Hibernate function on a VM when Windows have his own Fast boot as host OS ?

Thanks in advance for your patience and future ideas, answers, thoughts.

Answer 1

I haven't used Windows in a while, but as far as I understand, the issue only pops up when you write to the NTFS partition (files written from linux disappear when booting into windows). It is possible for a ubuntu (or any other linux based) system to read and write on a NTFS partition as long as you have ntfs-3g package installed. You can however mount the ntfs partition read-only either in /etc/fstab or through your favorite graphical application. As for ubuntu's hibernation feature, you need a separate swap partition where the OS saves the data stored in RAM.