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I've used NTFS-3G successfully. http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/

But the nfsmount people have this to say: "The ntfs-3g driver is an obsolete fork of ntfsmount. Use ntfsmount from ntfsprogs-2.0.0"

http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsmount

Who is correct???

"if I need to attack a device with dd or something, I'm not running dd.exe"

you're kidding, I can't remember when I last needed to DD to read a device, unless you mean a floppy that Windows can't access ..

The simple fact is that multi-booting is annoying. Windows has a hard time reading Linux filesystems and Linux has a slow time reading NTFS, so you end up with files that you can't conveniently access from one OS or the other (or both) and having to bounce back and forth to move files around, et cetera

If multi-booting is annoying then why not stick to the one OS. Most any version of Linux can read NTFS straight out of the box and there are a number of solutions

Every so often you add or remove some big waste of disk space and then you have to repartition and the most entertaining Linux filesystems can't necessarily be moved around conveniently, so you have to shuttle Linux off to another disk, repartition and resize Windows, then bring it back

You're kidding, if you run out of space, then add a second harddrive and map that into /home and you've doubled your storage, all without having to 'shuttle Linux off to another disk'

"I can't view photos from my camera in XBMC with autorun on insert"

You're still kidding, inserting a camera and a dialog box pops up ..

Absolutely. The current NTFS-3G project leader wrote the only open source NTFS resizer 6 years ago.

Why do you say "Dual booting was always an ugly hack"?

Two words: filesystem support.

Boot up Linux and all the stuff on your NTFS partition is read-only.

What? You know, Linux has had full NTFS Read/Write support for a while now, see :

http://www.linux-ntfs.org/

Also, ever heard about WUBI ?

jdb2

then there is ntfsclone... too, part of a larger suite of tools.

http://man.linux-ntfs.org/ntfsclone.8.html

Since MacOSX is BSD based, I would be willing to bet that similar projects and support can be found (but, I Am Not A Mac Fanboy).

On Windows, you are pretty much stuck using either NTFS or FAT. FAT volumes can not be created in windows larger than 32GB. Although, you could create the partition using 3rd party tools to get beyond that limitation. I have had some success mounting ext3 partitions using Ext2 Installable File System For Windows or Ext2 File System Driver for Windows.

Personally, from my experience, VFAT or NTFS are about your only options.

You should tell them about ntfsclone (part of the Linux NTFS project). The PXE/LiveCD RIP includes it. To back up a system, it's easy:

ntfsclone --save-image /dev/hda1 -o - | gzip -9 >hda1.gz

If you want it split up into, say, 512mb files:

ntfsclone --save-image /dev/hda1 -o - | gzip -9 | split -d - hda1.gz_

To restore a system use:

gunzip -c hda1.gz | ntfsclone --restore-image - -O /dev/hda1

or if you split it up:

gunzip -c hda1.gz_* | ntfsclone --restore-image - -O /dev/hda1

If doing multiple machines, it's a good idea to resize the filesystem to as small as it will go before creating the image. For example, I generally do 8G since that will usually hold everything:

ntfsresize --size 8G /dev/hda1

Then reboot into windows to let chkdsk run (I use BartPE instead and run chkdsk /f /r c:). Go back to RIP and save your image as above. When restoring a system, run the following command directly after ntfsclone to grow the filesystem to the full size of the partition:

ntfsresize -f /dev/hda1

To write a Windows boot loader use the tool ms-sys:

ms-sys -m /dev/hda

This can be scripted very easily. In the few places where I don't automate the whole install/app install/configuration with Unattended I use a RIP-based netboot. As soon as it boots it restores the image and then restarts the computer. So if I need to reimage a dozen computers all I have to do is walk in the room, turn on the computer, hit F3, and go to the next. Then I come back 15 minutes later and see that all of them are restored.

It already exists. ntfs-3g has full read/write support and is fully open source.

2. Fully support NTFS so I can dual boot and not only be able to work with my linux files from linux and my windows files from windows. At least have full read-write support on NTFS so I can really be able to use it in linux.

Just to be clear here... The problem with NTFS hasn't been a religious or ideaological hurdle. Nearly all Linux advocates agree that full NTFS support would be a boon to getting more people to use Linux. Microsoft knows this. Microsoft has not made the NTFS spec freely available because it could easily undermine their dominance on the desktop.

People volunteering their time have had to painstakingly reverse-engineer the NTFS file format. This is hard. How much confidence must you have in an NTFS driver before using it? A buggy driver could wipe out not only your Linux files, but all of your windows files as well.

Progress is being made. These folks seem to have a fairly well tested set of tools for NTFS access in Linux. But I would guesstimate that Linux is at least 1 year away from solid NTFS support.

Don't bother gzipping it - use this instead http://man.linux-ntfs.org/ntfsclone.8.html and all the zeroes are replaced with a special marker saying, in effect, "there be a huge chunks of zeroes here". Sparse files are cool. I stuck a 1-gig sparse file on a 1.44 floppy just to show it could be done.

The only Norton product I like is Ghost.

Give ntfsclone a try. Here's a good tutorial on using it.

It's easily scriptable, and is great in conjuction with ms-sys. If you spend a few minutes customizing something like RIP you can have the restore completely automated.

As a plus, everything's GPL'd. No licesence fees.

IMHO, Unattended + WPKG is still the best option, though...

Personally, I'm a linux guy. But when I've got to image windows, I use their sysprep tools from the resource kit cd's, and then use ntfsclone from the ntfsprogs package to do the actual backup and restore.

Conceptually, the whole thing is easy. Sysprep removes the windows registry identification, device map, and just redetects them upon first boot. However, theres a few steps you'll need to do after restoring from sysprep, but you can automate them. Things like having a random hostname generated for you. OK, not the best - so I make cygwin part of the image, and hack up some bash script to do a reverse DNS lookup on the localhost IP (from static MAC based DHCP lease), and have it rename itself using the netdom tools. Agh... oh yeah, so you pretty much need cygwin to automate your imaging process if you're going to use sysprep. Given enough time you can make it smo~oth, but you gotta sit down and hack it.

And if this was linux, I'd say use SIS.

--
RTFM, cause bitches love dat shit.

You can get pretty safe write support now via ntfsmount (FAQ entry).

You can get pretty safe write support now via ntfsmount (FAQ entry).

the filesystems used in linux are free and open.

• explore2fs application that reads files from an ext2/ext3 partition, with LVM2 support
• ext2ifs old project by the maker of explorefs2, native reading support of ext2/ext3 in windows NT and up
• ext2fsd native reading support of ext2/ext3
• ext2ifs NON-opensource (maybe violating GPL ?) native read/write support for ext2 (and ext3, but the driver could fuck-up the journaling if partition wasn't unmounted clean in linux). Has a nice GUI to assign drive letters to partitions.
• rfstools and GUI Yareg application that reads files from an reiserfs partition.
• rfsd - native reading support for reiserfs

• It is possible to add access to linux partition in windows
• Even write access is possible and currently the non-open source ext2ifs provides a solution that can be read/written by both OS and which is a little better than FAT32
• although Windows has no propper device mapper but only Dynamic Drives, LVM2 data can still be accessed (although not with a native driver).
• None of this numerous attempt is done by Microsoft. This show how much they want to play nice with the others

NTFS support in linux is not safe as far as I'm aware. All of the NTFS mounting tools I've tried have recommended mounting read-only unless you really have to.

You really should take a look at the current status of the NTFS drivers. They are now quite safe (although a backup is always something you should have anyway).

The kernel driver was completely rewritten in 2002 (the version prior to the rewrite was NOT safe). It has all the read-related features you would expect; write support is limited, and it will only do things it knows it can - other operations are refused. You can also use a userspace version of the driver (albeit with a performance penalty) and the "ntfsprogs" to get more write functionality. Again, it's safe - if an operation is not safely doable, it is refused. See Linux NTFS driver for details.

There are alternatives too: there is Jan Kratchovil's Captive NTFS driver, which uses the Windows ntfs.sys driver. This can do everything (of course), but is a user-space driver, which means it's not that fast; I'm not sure how stable this is either.

You can also buy Paragon Software's commercial NTFS driver for Linux. Do not confuse this link with the linux-ntfs one! They have a demo version you can download, and it also provides full read-write access.

If you know of a Windows ext3 or Raiser driver, then please tell me.

If you want to read/write ext2 and ext3 under Windows, try this driver. I've been using it (over Firewire and USB). It works well and transparently. You should use the hack of changing the partition type to "NTFS" with cfdisk on external drives so that the Windows PnP notification works for hotplugging; the partition itself stays formatted with ext2/3 (both Windows and Linux look at partition content instead of the partition table to determine the format when mounting). This is mentioned in the included documentation; the alternative is a control panel to assign letters to ext2/3 partitions. You don't need to reboot after installation before the driver can be used; you still need to use Linux to mkfs and fsck any ext2/3 paritions though.

-- Steve

Wake me when they support NTFS on Linux.

If by "they" you mean the open-source crowd, then check out here.

If by "they" you mean Microsoft, then check the status here.

Why people are so hot for apple and OS X when it's clearly quite restrictive. It's never even occurred to me that I couldn't have as many boots with as many different OS's as my heart desires using either windows or linux. As a Linux user writing to ntfs hasn't seemed like such an undoable thing.

So whats the big deal ? Why is this cause for celebration ?

I mean this is the whole reason why Apple failed in the first place, their totally unrealistic expectations that they could market their restrictive computing model at an exorbitant price. I really don't get why people are now lapping this stuff up.

Most Mac users I meet these days come across to me that their choice of computer is more about fashion than it is about function.

Last July, Apple asked Anton Altaparmakov, lead developer of the Linux-NTFS project, to dual license the Linux-NTFS driver under the APL so that the Intel version of OS X can read/write files on Windows partitions (presumably for dual-boot computers). The problem pointed out by other Linux-NTFS developers is that the APL is not GPL compatible, and any changes made by Apple to the driver will be unusable in Linux. As one person put it:

This would open up a one-way street: towards OS X and away from GNU/Linux and any other OS based on the GPL.

Not to mention the Konqueror / Safari fiasco where Apple complied to the terms of the LGPL by the skin of their teeth, making it impossible for open source developers to port changes upstream.

In November, Apple has again tried to hijack Linux-NTFS code, this time by suggesting that it be licensed under the LGPL. This was promptly rejected by one main developer, who threatened lawsuits.

What is being worked upon (kernel)

• Enlarging files. (expected on Linux 2.6.15)
• Shrinking files. (expected on Linux 2.6.16+)

There are other FS-aware tools available. ntfsclone, for instance, is considered mature and stable.