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Using the Real ntfs.sys Driver Under Linux
caseih writes "A very neat hack uses the real ntfs.sys driver (obtained from your own windows XP partition and used via a wine-like layer (borrowed from ReactOS) to mount an ntfs partion with full read/write access. While not an ideal solution and certainly not free as in speech, this is an ideal stop-gap measure for many people trying out linux. I think that we'll probably see this in Knoppix pretty soon."
Merry Christmas. Here you go:
Explore2fs
It would not seem unreasonable for the ntfs driver to be copied to a USB key or other media to be used at boot time.
Optimally, like the other suggestions, this driver should be moved during config time, but I would be willing to load it my USB doohickey prior to booting Knoppix/Mandrake Live/whatevernix.
I have valid Windows NT/2000/XP licenses on my machine, or I wouldn't have the NTFS partition to begin with. Maybe that's not a guaranteed assumption, and IANAL, but I don't think it would put too many MS lawyers on alert if it were done that way.
Perhaps a copyright/license file stating "These files are to be used on computer systems with valid Windows NT/2000/XP licenses only." when they are copied to the USB Key.
Design for Use, not Construction!
No, it doesn't. Linux supports a wide range of journalling file systems: ext3, JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, in addition to almost any filesystem known to man, INCLUDING native NTFS
Shouldn't Linux be on something "better" than FAT32
It is.
You got your facts wrong, that's all.
For Windows NT 4.0
For Windows 95
For Windows NT/2000/XP
For DOS, Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP, OS/2, BeOS, MacOS...
Money for nothing, pix for free
Probably the same way OS/2 loaded HPFS.IFS on HPFS partitions. The boot kernel had some kind of micro-HPFS driver that allowed the system access to certain folders on the HPFS partition, allowing it to load necessary drivers.
C:\>
The same way grub or lilo loads linux from a reiserfs or ext2/3 partition --- rudimentary read-only access is coded into the bootloader.
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
NTLDR does the dirty work.
NTLDR contains a mini-NTFS filesystem driver and mini registry parser. NTLDR reads the registry and determines all of the boot-start device drivers. NTLDR loads those drivers into RAM, then loads the kernel and the HAL.
NTLDR then passes control of the machine to the kernel, along with a pointer to the in-RAM loaded drivers so that the kernel can start those drivers.
How did people get around this issue before Read/Write access to NTFS? Did they have a FAT32 partition or something that both of the OS installations shared?
Linux is my primary O/S. I only use Windows to uhh... well... I'm not sure what I use it for since I haven't booted to it in a couple of months. But I still have it on another partition.
Anyway - I have my external Firewire drives formatted as EXT3 and I use Mount Everything to read/write to them under Windows. Not a free program though.
This is another solution you can try for reading/writing to Linux partitions under Windows. This one IS free.
And one final idea, also not free - and probably rendered obsolete by today's announcement of this Captive project - but it's another source never the less. This is for reading/writing to NTFS partitions under Linux.
I'd like to give credit to the people who pointed out these links to me but it was a long time ago and I don't remember who they were.
Nobody is suggesting putting the binary on a CD. It is already on the users computer - so there is no need.
I am amazed that anyone reading articles on slashdot doesnt know the correct meaning of the word hack.
... call yourself a geek ?
...
I suggest that you read here
http://www.jargon.8hz.com/jargon_23.html#SEC30
shame on you
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
The oft-repeated tagline "Wine is not an emulator" is false. It would only be true if the word "emulator" meant "hardware emulator".
It does not. Although most people think of CPU virtualization when they hear the word "emulator", that is not necessarily the case. According to dictionary definitions, WINE is emphatically an emulator.
Here's the defintion:
If you read the web page and try out the driver you'll find it does exactly this. It uses code from the ntfs project (libntfs) to grab the ntfs.sys file and copy it over to use it. Therefore no distribution of microsoft binaries is needed. If it can't find the driver on your hard drive, it can download it from microsoft.com from xp sp1 (which has some interesting legal implications).
While its 'write-safe', the writes it can do is completely useless to most people.
"The only supported operation is overwriting existing files, without changing the file length. No file or directory creation, deletion or renaming is possible. Note only non-resident files can be written to so you may find that some very small files (500 bytes or so) cannot be written to."
Maybe using the windows NTFS driver this way will help provide enough debug info to complete this driver
God Fucking Damnit
I think this is how NTFSDOS does it. Before you use it, you install their product on a working Windows machine (with NTFS) and generate boot floppies or CDs that then include the Microsoft-owned NTFS code.