On Sat, 8 Sep 2001 05:16:11 -0500, Sher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Dear friends:
>
> Using dual-boot LM 8.0/Win2000 (with NTFS File System).
>
> Question: Currently, Linux can only read NTFS files but not write to it. What
> is the reason for this? Is there any hope that Linux will be able to both
> read and write to NTFS soon?
>
> Thank you.
>
> Benjamin
As you would know, Microsoft are very secretive when it comes to their
intellectual property, like filesystems. Linux NTFS support is the result of a
great deal of experimentation and clever reverse-engineering. This is, of
course, extremely difficult to do, and it cannot be guaranteed to be 100%
reliable. To make matters more difficult, Microsoft have raised the bar a few
times, once with Win2K (upgrading NTFS4 to NTFS5) and again with WinXP (NTFS5 to
5.1). NTFS4 is very different from NTFS5, and Linux supports this older
filesystem a little better.
At present in Linux, NTFS read support is quite reliable, but write support is
still considered to be experimental. For this reason, Mandrake (and many other
distros) only compile read-only support into their kernel. If you change to
another kernel (e.g. by compiling your own) you can get write support. If you
decide to write to NTFS in GNU/Linux, you need to unmount the filesystem and run
a clean-up script before booting back into Windows to fix corruption issues.
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan.
"There are two major products that come from Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
