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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."
Surely it is illegal to copy the ntfs.sys driver and distribute it in another operating system, seeing as how it is a part of Windows.
I wonder how it's going to be done in Knoppix, without distributing a commercial DLL with the CD. Perhaps the following scheme could work:
Tricky. Depends on having the DLL somewhere on the disk.
-- Arik
Is there any free-as-beer software for Windows that would let me access (rw) my ext2 and ext3 partitions from Windows?
The owls are not what they seem
ntfs.sys surely can handle that, but what about the database? Ownership, permissions, sharing, all that stuff Microsoft boasts to have much better than Linux (better gradation of permissions in operations). That's pretty essential and would require pretty big amount of Microsoft backend software.
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This is similar to the current situation with Quicktime, Real and WMV playback on Linux - there is a technical solution, but it is illegal. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that the companies developing these secret formats will ever port to Linux, and even less likely that they will make them open source.
This would be very useful if you have an unbootable windows partition. I had problems with my logon file in XP once. I had replaced it to try something and ended up hosing my system. I had the file backed up but I couldn't use the Windows XP command line recovery because it couldn't logon and I couldn't copy it back over in Linux because of poor NTFS support. This would help people being able to fix the same or similar problems.
Aston Games
I don't care if it's not free as in speech. I've been waiting for a long time for some stable read/write support for my dual-booting system. If it's as stable at reading/writing as Windows, then this will be a great hack.
'free as in warez'? Hell, that's nothing new.
as a knoppix user, I hope to hell this stays WAY AWAY. Microsoft has published a good deal of api's for writing device drivers; it would be a better idea to develop OSS device drivers that allow read/write access to ext2/ext3/reiserfs filesystems instead.
Would be better legally, as well.
well, i can certainly see uses for this when somebody is messing around with knoppix and wants to access his ntfs partitions that he normally uses windows from.. though i'm pretty sure ms is going to try some nasty eula trick on this(actually i'm pretty sure xp's eulas could forbid, maybe not enforceably but anyways, using it in this fashion).
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world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Performance would not be anywhere near the performance of a native linux file system (either ntfs or ext3) since it uses the lufs kernel module to communicate via a unix socket with the user-land ntfs hack. So you wouldn't want to use it as your root file system or anything. But for accessing mp3s, changing the Windows administrator password, or other similar operations, this seems to work ok. Heck, even just reading and writing MS Word doc files would be fast enough to not really be noticable to a user.
Good ol Seth Nickell and Storage. WinFS-ish to be sure.
I added NTFS readonly (which is safe) support in my kernel, and always add a small fat partition in my dual boot system, as a spool are between both, have been doing it for years, and am happy with it. But i still like that hack though, pretty neat work.
The lunatic is in my head
It is clearly always possible using simple methods (unless M$ do really stupid things with the disk format, and then it would break on some disks and/or controllers) to read what is on the disk, using Linux, or for that matter an old version of Norton Utilities (when there really were useful utilities). There is no shortage of people who could run simple file writes from Windoze, and read back the changes to see what had really happened. I could do that, given some basic instructions. So. gathering info is not too hard, making sense of huge volumes of it, all the special cases, error recovery and all that sort of thing, possibly working around deliberate obfuscation, may be another matter.
I wonder if it might be better to do a clean-room implementation of the .dll, one team, who absolutely never, ever writes kernel code, disassembles it (they may even do an instruction trace with an emulator if it helps) and writes a spec, while the other re-implements it, without having ever seen the disassembly. That is legal. The key is writing an accurate spec from the results of the disassembly.
I don't know which method the kernel team are using, but IMHO they need more help (people, not competence, which they already have plenty of), only it would have to be meaningful and properly coordinated otherwise it would be a nuisance. Due to the past history of damaged files etc, they really ought to have many thousands of beta, or even alpha, testers on this one, and not pass the code as fit for general use until many gigabytes on thousands of different PCs have been read and written successfully. If someone would publish a to-do list, they might well find that useful assistance would be forthcoming.
When will us Mac users get NTFS support?
I'm not sure if you realize it, but there is no easy solution for using an external hard drive over 32gb with multiple platforms.
As of this driver, it appears that NTFS is probably the best way to do this, as it now has Linux support.
Windows or MacOS don't support Ext3 natively, and the 3rd party drivers are slow. Fat32 has a 32gb limit. Mac HFS+ can't be read by Windows.
How easy could it be to write an NTFS driver for OS X?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose