knoppix

[Leo J Mauler]

On Tue, 16 Mar 2004 10:05:10 -0600 Jonathan Hutchins
<hutchins at tarcanfel.org> writes:
> 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.

And I said "isn't generally supported" as opposed to your Assumption,
"isn't supported".  And I was only talking about *write* support.  I
specifically stated that you can *read* using the Linux NFS driver.

Linux NTFS Project, NTFS FAQ:
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#3.2
3.2 Can the Driver write to an NTFS volume, too?
Not really.  ...
There are two drivers, currently. The original driver, in 2.4 has some
write code in it, but it is extremely dangerous to use it. The
possibility of destroying your filesystem is very high.
The new driver, introduced in 2.5.11, has some write code, but it's very
limited. The driver can overwrite existing files, but it cannot change
the length, add new or delete existing files.
Adding write support will take a long time. NTFS is built like a
database. Any changes you make, necessitate making changes in many
places, for consistancy. Make a mistake and the filesystem will be
damaged, make too many mistakes and the filesystem will be destroyed.
Also, the current developers are only working on NTFS as a hobby, during
their free time. If you'd like to help, please email me:
webmaster at flatcap.org.
So as we can see from the Linux NTFS Project FAQ, NTFS write support
*isn't generally supported*.  You can try, but you have a good chance of
destroying a NTFS filesystem on the 2.4 kernel code, and the new driver
cannot add new files.

Oh, the FAQ mentions a workaround:
How to write to NTFS. If you are using a dual-boot
machine and just need NTFS write support to transfer
files from Linux to Windows, you can instead use a
Windows driver for ext2/ext3 and, while running
Windows, read the files from the Linux partition
instead. This way, using two read-only drivers, you
can still copy files from one file system type to the other.
And the FAQ mentions several Windows-based solutions to mount ext2/ext3
partitions in Windows.