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The whole point of forbidding mounting an unclean fs is to make people run fsck_$FS. Lacking this, $FS support is insufficient.
When forcing a mount, I don't know exactly what I'm forcing. Mount says it's probably an unclean FS, but who's to say there isn't something more seriously wrong with the filesystem?
Defragging on Windows (with its included deframentation tool) doesn't fix the kind of fragmentation ntfs-3g has issues with - don't ask me, that's what ntfs-3g's FAQ says.
About Linux complaining too much - no, I don't think it does. It'd help if it had the necessary tools to fix what it's whining about though.

FAT is in fact the ONLY filesystem in Windows that has patents from Microsoft. They only support ISO 9660, UDF and NTFS. The first two are standardized filesystems and NTFS doesn't have any known patents.

It's possible, of course, that Microsoft does hold patents that cover portions of NTFS, which haven't yet been identified as doing so. But the NTFS-3g people at least claim that "no NTFS patent is known in any country".

Linux's support of NTFS is essentially a joke

Linux has full read/write support for NTFS volumes.

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

What exactly is funny about this?

NTFS on Linux is slow.

Yes. And sadly FAT and ext3 is even slower. There can be many explanations for slowness, some are apparently explained on http://www.ntfs-3g.org/support.html#slow

NTFS-3G implements online recovery. Look for the recover and norecover mount options: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/releases.html

"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 ..

Did you know that Linux has limited NTFS support? I usually have to create a FAT32 partition to copy files between Windows XP and Linux. NTFS is usually read only or not available.

Have you heard of NTFS-3G?

The NTFS-3G driver is a freely and commercially available and supported read/write NTFS driver for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Solaris, Haiku, and other operating systems. It provides safe and fast handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 file systems.

And for those kind words I'm going to post a follow up to my original post of more relevant changes between the 2.4 and latest 2.6 kernels (I'll try and add a few more words after each point).

Kernel configuration was overhauled. Outside support for more GUI menus, it now means you no longer have to do make dep after changing something. Further building modules outside the kernel tree is now not so baroque. The time to build and partially rebuild kernels also dropped. Building a kernel in parallel (i.e. using more than one CPU during the build process) works better.

Better support for configuring out unneeded parts of the core kernel on embedded systems. You can see the seeds of this going mainline in a git commit on 2.5.70. There is an outside project called Linux Tiny that produces patches aimed at being able to configure out features not needed for embedded systems. Over the course of 2.6 many of these patches have trickled into the mainstream kernel.

I mentioned that 2.6 scales better under load in my previous post. Here are some benchmark comparison graphs of 2.4 versus 2.6 kernels (the graphs also include comparisons against the BSDs but you can see that Linux 2.4 had some serious problems that Linux 2.6 addressed).

The kernel is now (on systems where there is reliable device discovery) able to automatically load the modules it needs to drive hardware. No more having to adjust static lists of which modules need to be loaded.

udev was introduced. This change meant that the entries in /dev were no longer static. In 2.4 all possible device entries (even for devices you didn't have) were shown in /dev and their major/minor numbers were fixed (which was causing problems as new devices were turning up - what major/minor number do you give them?). Additionally the other dynamic /dev system (devfs) was whittled away and killed off.

FUSE support (LWN article about FUSE). Allows filesystem drivers to be written in userspace. Currently the best Linux NTFS driver is written using FUSE and it allows fun things like sshfs. Might be handy if you need users to be able to configure where data is stored remotely, you are writing your own filesystem or you need to support writing to NTFS formatted USB disks...

There is better CFS (Samba/SMB/Windows File Sharing) support. NFS version 4 support was also added.

cpufreq support. The kernel can clock down the CPU speed (usually by changing voltages via some hardware interface) to save large amounts of power. This can be done in response to work load so you run at full speed as often as possible and then when things are quiet you scale down to the lowest setting (you often save the most power when doing absolutely nothing so it pays to finish things as quickly as possible).

Any switch from 2.4 to 2.6 will of course require userspace changes (updated modutils, udev, later gcc, later glibc).

There is also davej's post Halloween document discussing changes from 2.4 to 2.5. This is very detailed and is another excellent reference.

Many many other things have changed too (e.g. ALSA support for sound has been added) but I have tried to keep the ones mentioned at least tangentially related to the original scenario :)

NTFS-3g in Linux (and OSX, and probably all other) is ridiculously fast. Benchmarks: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/performance.html and in my personal experience I can't tell when I'm on my ext3 partition and when on the NTFS partition. The best thing is the excellent crossplatform support, it just works everywhere (if NTFS-3g is available of course).

Actually it's available for over 190 distributions and it's the default one the most popular ones, e.g. Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Slackware, etc. Btw, thanks to FUSE, NTFS-3G also works on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, OS X and some others (more in the way).

NTFS-3G and all FUSE based file systems support shared-writable mmap
since kernel 2.6.26:
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#wine
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#vmware

NTFS-3G and all FUSE based file systems support shared-writable mmap
since kernel 2.6.26:
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#wine
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#vmware

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

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

For some reason, when a linux app tries to save a file with a question mark ("?"), which is an INVALID character on Windows

No it's NOT invalid. See exlanation at http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#posixfilenames2

When using characters that have accents on them ... lose data

Explained at http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#locale

In all of those cases, the partition works perfectly until you run CHKDSK

Chkdsk never modifies these characters because they are valid (NTFS uses unvalidated UTF16LE).

For some reason, when a linux app tries to save a file with a question mark ("?"), which is an INVALID character on Windows

No it's NOT invalid. See exlanation at http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#posixfilenames2

When using characters that have accents on them ... lose data

Explained at http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#locale

In all of those cases, the partition works perfectly until you run CHKDSK

Chkdsk never modifies these characters because they are valid (NTFS uses unvalidated UTF16LE).

Amarok has a documented performance issue with NTFS-3G: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#dd

The NTFS-3G web site has many tips what could be the problem for high CPU usage: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#cpu100

Sometimes NTFS defragmentation makes a magic.

The focus of the NTFS-3G development is reliability and functionality over performance. The performance optimizations started only recently and the current development versions perform close or sometimes surprisingly even better than ext3.

Amarok has a documented performance issue with NTFS-3G: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#dd

The NTFS-3G web site has many tips what could be the problem for high CPU usage: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#cpu100

Sometimes NTFS defragmentation makes a magic.

The focus of the NTFS-3G development is reliability and functionality over performance. The performance optimizations started only recently and the current development versions perform close or sometimes surprisingly even better than ext3.

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/performance.html

Doesn't look that slow to me, slower than ext3 but eventually faster than XFS and FAT32 for instance, and both of them are within the kernel.

NTFS-3G solves your problem.

Off you go!

This is an user space driver, but it works perfectly.

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

Here: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

Why is it needed in the kernel?

For performance I guess.

Try NTFS-3G.

Also, blame Microsoft for not releasing the technical specs behind the FS. Reverse-engineering a filesystem (especially one that MS likes to change often) isn't exactly easy.

Finally, you can always reformat "larger USB drives" into a FS that's more efficient (ext3, reiserfs).

Here: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

Why is it needed in the kernel?

1) FAT is a very simple file system and the Linux implementation of NTFS is even less complete than ext2 is on Windows.

It's not native but it works like a charm:
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/index.html

I use this both under Ubuntu and Leopard on my Mac Book Pro. I have never, not once had a problem and I've read and written to my 5 NTFS drives with 10 partitions.

But there's more to a stable project than a lot of enthusiastic contributors.

Some developers are paid to work on the project.

There has to be a central gatekeeper who provides project management, makes sure code gets reviewed, and imposes some kind of vision on the disparate goals of the contributors. I assume you have somebody like that,

Yep, that's supposed to be me ;-) Code review is not enough, test cases are also required for new code and bug fixes, moreover no regression is allowed in our test suites: http://ntfs-3g.org/quality.html

The roadmap is user feedback, developer contribution and sponsor-driven. The main priorities are reliability/stability, most requested features, and performance.

In practice, we don't see significant performance hit in daily use because of the NTFS-3G driver architecture. All known performance problems are due to other reasons which are being already addressed.

In fact, the performance results of the hybrid space, unoptimized NTFS-3G driver is already comparable or sometimes even better than the results of several in-kernel file system drivers. If you're interested, there are some technical explanation on the kernel list at http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/4/18/136

Reasons for the most common NTFS-3G performance problems, which are often incorrectly attributed to its hybrid space nature, can be found at http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#slow

Why are you formatting the first drive with FAT32? Do you just not like your data?

Linux OSes including Ubuntu have had stable read/write support for NTFS for over a year now. The only reason to subject yourself to FAT32 is if you plan on booting to Windows 98.

I guess because your distro didn't setup your locale before mounts. This works fine for me using Ubuntu.

vmware doesn't seem to work with the vm stored on ntfs3g partitions,

Apparently Vmware has fixed the problem: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/support.html#vmware

funny permissions in windows on files/dirs created with ntfs3g...

I have never seen this. I also can't find it ron the ntfs-3g forums, developer list and in the support documents.

Don't get me wrong, ntfs3g is a nice piece of software, taking into account that AFAIK, MS doesn't make the NTFS specifications public.

The specification is tiny part of the picture. NTFS is over 20 time more complex than ext3. The latter is financed by multi-billion companies but the former is worked on by only a few guys in their spare spare time.

It sounds like you used the 1.5 year old stable Debian ntfs-3g package from backport. You definitely shouldn't. There were quite a lot of big improvements since then: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/releases.html

Well what I experienced were: files/directories with non-ascii characters in their names do not show up, vmware doesn't seem to work with the vm stored on ntfs3g partitions, funny permissions in windows on files/dirs created with ntfs3g... There are solutions of course http://www.ntfs-3g.org/support.html , but it takes a little tweaking around.
Don't get me wrong, ntfs3g is a nice piece of software, taking into account that AFAIK, MS doesn't make the NTFS specifications public.
Anyway the the best way to go is to get rid of your ntfs partitions if you make the switch to Linux ;)

Have you tried NTFS-3G? It really is very stable, no doubt due to the exhaustive testing regime on every release - see http://www.ntfs-3g.org/quality.html - and is used by default in most Linux distros. It's a different codebase to the older Linux-NTFS and Captive NTFS projects, and has reasonably good performance.

Since ZFS is new, I don't think your scenario applies, and it's not intended for DVD/CD use.

...they are slow and OS dependent, either you loose oceans of space (FAT formatted drives) or you can't write to them from some OS'es (NTFS formatted drives) or a Mac just reformats the whole drive because it can't read it.

You work with MS-Office and my secretary uses OpenOffice. Complete and perfect exchange of documents possible?

Ah, but this ruling has nothing to do with that. This ruling has to do with bundling media players and browsers with the OS, things which you can choose to replace with things like VLC and Firefox. Please try and stay on topic with your next response.

Why is it possible to mount Unix/Linux filesystems easily as network shares in a PC but it is practically impossible to mount a PC file system in Linux? Why can't a dual boot pc read/write partitions that can be used by the "other" system?

I have a NTFS fileshare mounted in my dual boot FC4/WinXP x64 computer at home, works just fine. What problems do you encounter? Tried NTFS-3G?

Why can't MSFT and Linux produce a common ext3/ntfs file system read/write by both?

Pick one. There are NTFS drivers for Linux and ext3 drivers for Windows. I've used both with (as Borat would say) "Great Success!!"

It is exactly same as Samsung TV refusing to play anything other than a Samsung DVD player. Customers would reject it immediately. Corporate suits buy and install and switch over to MSFT exchange server and then run on the upgrade treadmill all their lives. Why?

Because Exchange integrates so damn nice with Outlook, an email/calendar/tasking program, and also integrates with SharePoint, a web-based project management tool. That's one big problem with Linux software I've encountered, lack of integration. Please, show me an email suite that integrates with calendar, and integrates with my project management tools, and then again with my word software so if I need to do a mass mailing I can pick a corporate mailing list and send against it? That's why. Ease of use.

And your analogy is still crap. Think about it and get back to me.

Advanced file system (i.e., better than FAT32) that Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux understand.

• Windows will only install on the first partition of the master disk on IDE-0. If you've already installed Linux there, you'll have to either move the partitions or chuck in another HD as master.
• Windows will destroy your MBR. Can anyone post the command to fix this from a live CD?
• FAT32 is the only partition type both Windows and GNU/Linux support natively. There are also Windows drivers for Ext2, and GNU/Linux drivers for NTFS.

NTFS read write is reliably supported under Linux, if anything its the Mac that would be the problem there.

By default OS X only has ready-only NTFS support, but there is a Read-Write plugin (ntfs-3g) available as a plugin for MacFUSE:

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

Here is a set of instructions to get it working, it mentions much older versions, but the idea is the same:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-r ead-and-write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.h tml

Of course, you could run NTFS on Linux if you've got two big brass ones.

You could do it if you had a pair of sub-atomic soap bubbles. ntfs-3g has been stable for a while now.

I would think any filesystem supported by MacFUSE would be the best place to start. Their is a NTFS-3G module for MacFUSE, and it works under linux, too.

Not true, check http://forum.ntfs-3g.org/ for ntfs-3g parameters to mount rw.

See above.

The NTFS-3G driver is an open source, freely available read/write NTFS driver for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, NetBSD, and Haiku. It provides safe and fast handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 and Windows Vista file systems. Most POSIX file system operations are supported, with the exception of full file ownership and access right support.

NTFS-3G

I don't see an open source file system driver for Linux that lets you reliably write to NTFS formatted partitions,

I have been seeing it for quite a while now. NTFS-3G, which works within the FUSE userspace file system framework, has an excellent reputation for reliability.

I get your point.. BUT. There is a very good NTFS writer for Linux http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

NTFS is open source and took less than a decade to get support on multiple systems?

Yes, NTFS-3G