Sometimes, your best windows watch-dog, is a linux

I had an annoying morning with linux mint refusing to boot, 

in what at first appeared like a weird hanging at initial logo 

then, switching to the text messages (something you would expect

any self-respecting o/s to do, once an error is encountered),

it became apparent that mint was encountering difficulties 

mounting a partition. the data partition. 

Rebooting into mint recovery, and running fsck (thru the nice menu the recovery mode suggests)

things soon became clear: the data partition had a problem. 

Thinking about it, it soon became clear - During the weekend i found myself  booting using windows 10 (something i haven't done for a while, wishing to check something

about oracle xe on windows), and apparently, something in that usage end

left the partition with errors. 

Rebooting into windows, i expected the o/s to find the error and fix it by itself,

but windows 10 thought everything is ok(strengthening my dislike for this horrendous o/s). 

Only a manual chkdsk (using the nice properties/tools menu) has made windows realize that there was a problem with the partition. 

Having repaired it, I rebooted, and was happy to be back  with mint. But before I got back to work, I thought it might be wise to document this sordid adventure. 

So, what did I learn this morning ? 

1. linux is better than windows in identifying problems relating to an  NTFS partition both

   systems use in a dual-boot architecture.  

2. mint is not very good in communicating its problems at boot through the GUI interface. 

3. even a random usage of windows 10 may haunt you days later...

[update, 10/04/2016: I've been a little bothered by Mint's behavior and went back to find out why was it that I could not fix the partition's errors through Mint, turns out that ntfsfix is not linked by default to fsck.ntfs. Leaving fsck helpless, facing NTFS partitions. If you ran into a similar problem, this thread suggests a solution - making the necessary links - that worked for me]