Stopping Win7 disk write permissions

I've got a new system on which I have set up a dual boot with Win7 Premium and Linux. There is a second hd which I use for storing data and which is formatted as ntfs. Both os's have access to this but whenever I copy data from Linux, Win7 apparently wipes it and it's driving me nuts.

For example, yesterday I copied all 200gigs of my photographs to this drive from my old laptop, which took ages in itself. I then did a few hours of work on the latest pictures and later rebooted into Win7 to have a go of Skyrim. While in Windows I then noticed that the Pictures folder on D: was empty ! I rebooted into Windows and this time it did a long chkdsk and recovered about 30 pics from over 10,000 which was absolutely marvellous, not

Rebooting in Linux confirmed that everything was gone. I scanned the drive in both Linux and Windows and there are no errors. I then copied over some more files via Linux and scanned again, no problem. Back to Windows again and over half of them had disappeared by the time I logged in and opened explorer!

So, currently I'm thinking I'm going to format this drive entirely as ext4 so that Windows cannot read it (except read-only via ext2fs) unless someone can suggest how I can make it read-only to Windows as is ? Linux is my main o/s and I've never had this issue previously on any machine (which includes Linux writing to Windows partitions for more than ten years now). Any ideas?

 

Do you hibernate Windows 7 when you switch to Linux? Sounds like that could be the problem:
windows - dual boot missing files on ntfs - Ask Ubuntu

 

Thanks for the reply. That's interesting but I don't actually use hibernation or even sleep/suspend. Other than that it's exactly what's happening to me.

I've been playing around a bit more testing it and files and directories are just randomly disappearing for no apparent reason. The only thing I've been able to find regarding read-only in Windows is this How to mount an NTFS partition read-only in Windows? - Super User so I'm probably just going to wipe it and format as ext4.

 

I think you need some way of telling Windows the drive is volatile (can be modified outside of its control). With some kind of network mounted drive, I expect this wouldn't happen, as Windows knows/expects changes to occur to the volume from other sources. One possibility would be to put a network share on the drive or have Windows mount it as if it were an external volume (nfs, samba .. ?)

Of course, if it is not important to have access from Windows to this volume, ext3/4 is the easiest solution.

Sorry my answer is vague, I tried to google search but I couldn't express properly what I was looking for to get any decent search results. Good luck resolving this.

 

Thanks for the responses, I appreciate them.
I've given up on it and reformatted as ext4. The ext2fs app allows me to mount it as read-only (and also read/write, but I no longer trust Windows) so I can still pull data from it from Windows if required, say if I wanted to edit a file in some specific app.