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."

Comments

I'm not sure if we'll see it in knoppix

[Steve 'Rim' Jobs]

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.

Re:I'm not sure if we'll see it in knoppix

[TiggsPanther]

Wouldn't need to copy it. At least, not to distribute, anyway.

Use the copy off the hard drive. Mount it in read-only using the normal way, copy it to the Knoppix ramdrive, and then run the driver from there.

Re:I'm not sure if we'll see it in knoppix

[k98sven]

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

Um... I'm wondering here: How does Windows load ntfs.sys from an NTFS partition???

Knoppix

[arikb]

I think that we'll probably see this in Knoppix pretty soon.

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:

1. Look for NTFS partitions and mount them with the R/O driver
2. Scan those folders for the dll and copy it into the ramdisk
3. Unmount the partitions, then remount them with the Windows dll for r/w

Tricky. Depends on having the DLL somewhere on the disk.

-- Arik

Re:Knoppix

[tsetem]

> 1. Look for NTFS partitions and mount them with the R/O driver
> 2. Scan those folders for the dll and copy it into the ramdisk

mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /ntfs
if (-e /ntfs/winnt/system32/drivers/ntfs.sys)
{
cp /ntfs/winnt/system32/drivers/ntfs.sys /ramdisk
}
umount /ntfs
if (-e /ramdisk/ntfs.sys)
{
# Do Wrapper voodoo here.
}

Doesn't seem to conceptually hard (or tricky) to me.

What about users/permissions?

[SharpFang]

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.

"Secret" software is a real problem for OSS

[Steve 'Rim' Jobs]

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.

Useful

[mc_wilson]

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.

How stable?

[teslatug]

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.

Re:OK... good

[caseih]

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.

What about Mac Users?

[moosesocks]

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?