knoppix

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Monday March 15 2004 09:25 am, Leo J Mauler wrote:

> NTFS support is only guaranteed for *reading* NTFS filesystems.  Writing
> to or deleting from a NTFS filesystem isn't generally supported in Linux

I keep hearing people expound about this, and it just isn't true.  R/W support 
for NTFS has been available for years.

When I first used it on NT4 systems several years ago, it was pretty customary 
for it to set the "dirty" bit on the FAT so that Windows would do a partition 
scan for errors when it was next started up, but support was soon improved so 
that this wasn't necessary.

It's apparent that some people do experience problems.  This may happen more 
on compressed NTFS volumes, I don't know, but one of the responses to this 
has been the development of "captive NTFS drivers".  These use portions of 
the Windows code from the Windows partition itself.  The partition is mounted 
read-only, and then scanned for the DLL files that include the proprietary 
code.  Once these have been accessed by the Linux drivers, the partition can 
be re-mounted in read-write mode.

I used a Linux Defender CD that included Captive NTFS and a virus scanner on a 
system a few weeks ago, and it worked just fine.  I did observe that some of 
the temporary MSIE files were not deletable, but didn't investigate the 
issue.  (Linux Defender is yet another Knoppix derivative.)

As everyone keeps insisting, you run R/W NTFS access at your own risk to the 
data - but I recommend that before you preach about how well it does or 
doesn't work, you do some work yourself to try both the native Linux drivers 
and the "Captive" drivers.