Slashdot Mirror
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."
Project includes the first open source MS-Windows kernel API for Free operating systems
Surely that would be ReactOS, where he got a lot of the code from.
But still, so it begind. First NDIS drivers now FS drivers. Next up it will be a GDI wrapper for X so you can use Windows binary drivers with your graphics card.
All of this is a complete waste of time though. When did Open Source simply become a way to avoid paying for Windows?
right on the head. I'm still trying to make a real step into a Linux partition. I've been using Knoppix live and so far my bosses are mostly just confused. This might help me show them (and thus provide me a box to install on) how easy (and cheap!) this stuff really is.
It would be perfectly legal for Knoppix to *know* that you might have an NTFS.SYS around on your computer, look around to see whether this is the case, and if it is, use your own copy NTFS.SYS.
Of course, Knoppix will never itself be packaged with the NTFS.SYS. But if you have an NTFS partition, you have a damn good chance of having an NT around as well, with the driver right in there.
I can only hope that MS doesn't insert some nastiness into the NTFS.SYS that would prevent it from running inside the framework described in TFA.
HTH
VKh
That sort of thing is exactly what this is good for. Let's say you give a Linux distro to a friend so he can try it out. This could be a Live CD or a distro that will make your system dual boot.
In any case, your friend probably has a bunch of files on his Windows partition (likely NTFS formatted) that he wants to see if he can edit/view in Linux. If he can do what he wants, then switching to Linux becomes an option. So, with this, his NTFS partition is available and everything just works(TM). After all, your friend doesn't even know what NTFS is, but he does know when he can't get at his files.
In short, this makes transitions to Linux much smoother. People shouldn't have to keep a copy of a file on both partitions just so its available in both environmets. It becomes a pain to figure out which document is the most recent, etc. etc. And, BTW, I'm talking about the average user who doesn't have a network drive.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Surely it is illegal to copy the ntfs.sys driver and distribute it in another operating system
.sys file can be loaded from the harddisk (if present). Systems with an NTFS formatted harddisk and no ntfs.sys file are probably rare. Problems that need to be solved are, how to verify intergrity of the ntfs.sys file you are going to load (if you care about that), and how to actually load the ntfs.sys file from an NTFS filesystem. It is not entirely a chicken and egg situation, as Linux already have NTFS read support, which is far simpler than full read-write support. Besides loading ntfs.sys would even be a user mode task, and reading NTFS from user mode is probably easier to implement than doing it from kernel mode.
I was thinking exactly the same, but there might be a way around that. Knoppix just have to contain the wrapper code, the actual
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Sure it could work. The kernel NTFS driver is reliable enough in read-only mode. If you have NTFS partitions on your computer, you most likely have an installation of Windows where you can copy that file. It just has to search all NTFS and FAT partitions for \WINNT or \WINDOWS. This won't work if you don't dual boot and have removable media formatted with NTFS.
The only people who would need it already have it as a part of their Win2k/XP/2003 OS. Why else would anyone be using NTFS if they weren't running Windows?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Such boasts are obviously proved empty by full read write access from a boot disk
Any non encrypted filesystem would have all access controls subverted when mounted under a foreign operating system. Claiming anything else is absurdity. Do you think that ext2 holds the chmod based security when I mount it up under a box that it wasnt created under? You do realize that any user with root on any Linux box could simply reset all the attributes meant to keep users off/let them in under a different box?
Why would you hold MS to fault for something that is unversial and by its nature fundamental?
those of us on non-x86 platforms that want read/write NTFS access to external (firewire / usb2.0) drives will only suffer due to driver emulation layers like this.
it satisfys much of the normal x86 crowd which means development of the real driver suffers.
I do appreciate the difficulties the kernel team have had with this, it is not their fault that they have to work with an undocumented closed-source file system.
The strange thing about all this is that very many different OSs which have existed over the years have had some capability to read and write "foreign" file systems, either built in or as a third-party driver. Certainly it is standard with Linux, *BSD, even the hated SCO, also MAC in most of its variants, Amiga, Atari, Solaris....... Even many 8-bit computers could read a variety of foreign file systems. The one name missing is M$, absolutely none of their stuff recognises any othe OS at all. (Please correct me if I am wrong!) It is as if Bill arrogantly imagines that there are only Windoze PCs in this universe. The fact is that there are many things that can't be done under Windoze, but are relatively easy under some other OS. Maybe the reverse is true also, but I can't think of an example. It is absolutely normal in this day and age, even without open source, to need to read and write foreign file systems. The one obstacle is the Chief Hacker of Redmond, he will neither interface to other people's file systems (despite having the documentation, and most drivers under BSD licence) nor will he let anyone else do it by denying proper access to his documentation.
One day, when the masses wake up to what they have been denied since Messy-DOS 1, he may realise that his monopolistic actions have in fact shot himself in both feet.