This will work by preventing Windows from trying to mount the drive, but does not fix the problem (which is in the filesystem)

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

On my drive that had the same behaviour, using XP SP3 disk I can access recovery console. Don't know what's in THAT drive.

well maybe we're talking about different problems. it seems to me that using ntfs4dos is a lot more efficient than using r-studio etc since you get the partition completely recovered in minutes (having made a backup first of course). none of the defective partitions i had were win bootable in any way (even caused stop 24 on usb plugin immediately). never found the actual fault but i didnt invest mucht time in it, chkdsk run from ntfs4dos found only standard errors you encounter every day (unused space in mft...).

Yes, may perfectly be.