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

NTFS, not good.

[Captain Goatse]

Why would anyone want to use NTFS partitions, really!?

It is obviously inferior to ext3 and the upcoming ReiserFS!

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Walkiry]

To access the 60 gigs of porn they have downloaded with Kazza under windows XP? Dunno, just tossing ideas around...

Re:NTFS, not good.

[xirtam_work]

Why?

To read files from an existing NTFS partition, and be able to write files, I'd imagine.

Seems obvious to me. I don't think this is anything to do with one format being better than another, it's about inter-operability.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

some people dual boot

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're smart enough to dual boot, they should be smart enough to know to create a FAT32 partition that would enable them to transfer data between multiple enviroments.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

hello Captain... what's happening?

uhhhhh... we got sort of a problem here... yeaah... you appearantly didn't put one of the new GNAA advertisements on your first post.

mmmh... yeahh.. you see, we're putting the GNAA advertisements on all first posts now before they go out. did you see the memo about this?

so if you could just go ahead and make sure you do that from now on, that would be great.

and i'll go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that text. mmmmkay?

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is FAT32 superior to ntfs or ext3?

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Sir, I am sorry to say that I am not a member of the GNAA.

I am a member, the leader, of the gay [nigger](we do not really care as long as you're young and stiff) pirate ship owned by Captain Goatse.

We travel the seas of the world raping young brats, join us some time, mmkay.

By the way, we hate the GNAA.

Anyway, I'm sorry if I caused any problems.

-Captain Goatse(has run out of daily trolls)

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it matter one single tiny little bit? Jeez, we're talking about transfering files between to enviroments. What could you ever possibly need to do between those two enviroments that wouldn't work if you used a FAT32 partition to transfer the data?

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you need read/write access to your porn?

Re:NTFS, not good.

[SpaceCadetTrav]

You can't secure an NT machine using FAT32, which makes it completely pointless. FAT32 doesn't support ACLs and has a tendency to become corrupted. Anyone using FAT32 partitions on a Windows machine is making a very bad decision. It was designed in the 80's, after all.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

After adopting the Linux lifestyle, you will want to delete the hetro stuff.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is FAT32 superior to ntfs or ext3?

In what way?

Security? Not really. But all file systems can be circumvented by booting a kernel you have full access to. But for normal run-time applications FAT has no security at all where others do.

Performance? Tough call. Under certain circumstances FAT is faster (small number of files and medium sized files), other times it's slower (server applications, lots of files).

FAT can't handle files greater than 2GB. And partitions can't be bigger than 30GB.

FAT is more universal though. It's a very simple concept and drivers are small. It will work on anything from a Mac to Linux, even Slowaris.

FAT makes a good intermediate file system. Like for transfering files (I use it on my firewire drives). But for server/desktop applications then NTFS/Ext/Reiser/etc. are better.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a shame you got modded down.

NTFS has many advantages - ACLs, streams, journalling, etc. However, the linux/posix interface does not support these advanced features (blame it on the 1970s everything-is-a-file mentality).

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

The original comment seemed to think it mattered that is why I asked.

But my question for you is: If it doesn't matter why does ntfs, ext2, ext3, etc. exist?

It is not always about transferring between environments. It is about creating and storing files in an environment, then modifying them, then saving them, then storing them longer, then TRANSFERING them, then storing them in the other partition etc. My point is, it is more than just one operation.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[webtre]

write access to put MORE porn on your filesystem.

everyone likes MORE porn, don't they?

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are using a FAT32 partition for live storage then yes, I would agree that would be a very poor decision. However, Don't Do That Then! I've used a FAT32 partition to transfer data between Linux and Windows for over five years now, and I've never once had a problem with this arangement.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

I never said you should run Windows on FAT32, or use the FAT32 partition as a live storage solution. I am talking about the deliberate transfer of data between two different enviroments. If your main partition is NTFS for Windows, ext3 for Linux and you have a third FAT32 partition to transfer data between the two, the issues you raise do not apply.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you then have to preplan which files you will need to read/write in linux later and copy them into the FAT32 partition before you boot into linux?

Re:NTFS, not good.

[dirty]

FAT32 can handle partitions > 30GB just fine. Windows XP just won't let you create them. IIRC the max partition size in FAT32 is 2TB.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha, excellent!

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only ONE type of porn: MORE PORN

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Kethinov]

How can I create an 80gb FAT32 partition? I was hoping to use an 80gb FAT32 drive as universal storage for both my Windows and Linux installations.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[lucas teh geek]

using linux fdisk and mkfs.vfat

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Kethinov]

Thanks! :)

Re:NTFS, not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that you have to decide in advance what you want to transfer. A reliable r/w ntfs solution lets you access your system partition, and make changes, so you don't need to plan in advance.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[gpinzone]

Use FDISK. There's no artifical 32 GB restriction for FAT 32 there.

Re:NTFS, not good.

[osu-neko]

It was designed in the 80's, after all.

So? So were graphical user interfaces. So was C++ (as opposed to C and Unix which were designed in the 60's). What determines whether something is a good or bad decision has everything to do with the features and pitfalls and nothing at all whatsoever to do with the date it was invented.

OK... good

[herrvinny]

OK, but I imagine having to load all that would take a toll on performance. How fast does it run, and more importantly, how can a free (read: non-encumbered) version of this be made?

Re:OK... good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it looks good to me for troubleshooting and forensic purposes. I wouldn't use this to mount an NTFS share housing mp3s however.

Re:OK... good

[gl4ss]

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).

-

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.

Re:OK... good

[FattMattP]

I wouldn't use this to mount an NTFS share housing mp3s however.

Agreed. If you just need to read the mp3 partition then the NTFS driver in the kernel should work fine.

Re:OK... good

[KDan]

What if you need to read and write? I am in the (sloowwwww) process of setting up an el'cheapo linux box which I'll stuff my drives into. Unfortunately they are 120Gb NTFS drives, mostly full, and I can't afford another drive to do the copying/reformatting (not to mention the time to do this...). Would this solution work for this problem? ie could I mount the drives directly with a read-write Samba share so that I can access them from my home network (Both for read and write..)??

Daniel

Re:OK... good

[aristotle-dude]

RTFA. It says that you can mount the drive as read/write. This has nothing to do with Samba.

Re:OK... good

[Silroquen]

On the contrary, if you want to share a partition over Samba, to have read/write access to the Samba share, the kernel obviously needs read/write access to the actual partition.

Re:OK... good

[Progman3K]

IANAE (I'm not an expert) BUT,

Wine is actually fast because it ISN'T an emulator, it's an implementation of Win32 on Linux, and ReactOS isn't an emulator either, so in both cases, you'd get pretty close (if not actual) native-speed performance.

You WOULD get a hit on memory consumption though, those modules need RAM, certainly.

Re:OK... good

[Trigun]

Via SMB or CIFS protocols. SAMBA does not know how to read or write NTFS. It is merely a transport.

You can mount an NT Share using Samba, not an NT filesystem.

Re:OK... good

[pyros]

There were two ways to interpret the original question: how do I mount the network shared NTFS drives from my Windows box on my Linux box; or how do I mount the Windows partitions on my Linux box so I can share them over the network with Samba. The indication was there that the physical discs with the NTFS partitions would be in the Linux box, so the kernel would have to understand NTFS to mount them. Then Samba could be used to share them over the network.

Re:OK... good

[Malcolm Scott]

The 2.6.0 kernels have safe read/write support for NTFS. (Not complete support, but enough for most purposes AFAIK.)

Re:OK... good

[pyros]

You're right about the emulator vs implementation argument, but it's still pretty slow. The problem with Wine (plain Wine, not WineX or Crossover, they might have better implementations of common DLLs, never used either so I can't comment) is that you still have to own a copy of windows to legeally have copies of the DLLs that most interesting applications need. At that point, you're better off dual-booting (if you only have one machine) and avoiding the performance hit. Anecdotally, I notice the performance hit running Kazaa Lite K++ in Wine versus in Windows.

Re:OK... good

[Minna Kirai]

Wine is actually fast because it ISN'T an emulator

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:

1. 3.
2. Computer Science. To imitate the function of (another system), as by modifications to hardware or software that allow the imitating system to accept the same data, execute the same programs, and achieve the same results as the imitated system.

Re:OK... good

[Progman3K]

OK, so therefore, Windows 95, 98, ME, 2K and XP are emulators.

They all "imitate the function of (another system), as by modifications to software that allow the imitating system to accept the same data, execute the same programs, and achieve the same results as the imitated system."

They are all Win32 emulators.
Just like Wine.

Re:OK... good

[GizmoToy]

So sure, by a dictionary definition its an emulator. However, the fact remains that no one cares what the dictionary says. Wine does not consist of an emulation layer, a necessary feature of what most people would consider an emulator.

So while Wine does emulate Windows as your textbook definition says, Wine does not fit the definition of an emulator.

Re:OK... good

[Anonymous Coward]

God, I hate needless Slashdot acronyms.

If you're not a lawyer, don't post legal commentary.

Similarly, if you're not an expert, don't post like you are. Don't warn us you're not and basically invalidate the rest of your post.

Re:OK... good

[dinivin]

However, the fact remains that no one cares what the dictionary says.

It might be more accurate to say that no developer cares what the dictionary says. Many users, however, do.

Dinivin

Re:OK... good

[cxreg]

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

Re:OK... good

[lysander]

OK, so therefore, Windows 95, 98, ME, 2K and XP are ... all Win32 emulators.

They are all win32 implementations with a common API. It would be a stretch to call them emulators, IMHO.

Re:OK... good

[tiger99]

Is that safe enough, or complete enough? Having had an NTFS partition badly damaged by Linux soem time ago, I don't really want to try it yet.

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.

Re:OK... good

[KhanAFur]

F.Y.I.

Wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator

Debunking Wine Myths

-Mary

Re:OK... good

[tiger99]

I hope you are right. I wonder if there are any other ways of attacking the problem, other than beating up Bill of course, which is best left to Melinda.

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.

Re:OK... good

[tiger99]

Does it have to be done that way? Is it not possible, given that the Linux kernel can be modified, for a Windoze .dll to be loaded directly in kernel memory space, with a minimal wrapper round it to map linux system calls to the correct dll entry points?

I am not an expert, but all OSs I have ever seen support a fairly standard set of file operations, the mapping should not be overly complex. Or have M$ messed up big time, as usual, and created a messy interface with hundreds of entry points where about 3 would suffice?

Re:OK... good

[shaitand]

Before even bothering to ask if you COULD do it, better decide if you SHOULD do it. Would you really want a windows dll destablizing the kernel? The minute you let windows code into the kernel we are little better off than windows users in terms of stability.

Re:OK... good

[PetiePooo]

There are existing OSS NTFS drivers that work in read-only mode right? Well, here's a way around the MS EULA for most: make loading ntfs.sys a three-step process:

Mount the NFTS partition you want write access to using the OSS read-only version,

read the winnt/system32/ntfs.sys driver into memory or RAM-disk,

remount it using the method described in the article.

This way, Knoppix (or whichever distro implements this) wouldn't have to include the EULA-protected M$ driver. Its as legal as any other WINE-like use of existing, O/S-speicific DLLs and drivers.

Obviously, this wouldn't work for NTFS partitions that don't have an actual NT-based O/S installed on it, but if that's the case, why do you have that partition on your HD in the first place?!

Re:OK... good

[shaitand]

wine is a win32 implementation with an incomplete but common api. It would be a stretch to call it an emulator IMHO.

Re:OK... good

[PetiePooo]

Good morning, pedantic-man. Good to see you're feeling ornery today..

Guess I should have posted my previous message anon so I could mod this message "-1, Asshole"

Re:OK... good

[xenocide2]

Actually, I think there's a good chance knoppix won't be including this. Its a chicken and egg type problem: the ntfs driver will likely be stored on an ntfs partition. In a normal linux installation you can fix this by mounting the ntfs drive as read only and moving the core driver elsewhere. Then just unmount the drive and remount with the ntfs binary hack.

On the other hand, Knoppix defaults to read only on all writable media. This is for safety reasons, so you can't screw things up by just reading the drive. I'm pretty sure it can read NTFS, but it wouldn't have many places to put the driver. Knoppix can't include the binary itself, since its copyrighted by MS (and probably backed by several patents).

Note that if you have no way of reading NTFS at all, you're almost completely hosed, since the ntfs.sys file will be on an ntfs partition. Fortunately Free implementations of NTFS exist and are reasonably stable in read only mode.

Re:OK... good

[Hobbex]

So is Kaffe a Java emulator then? Is GCC a C compiler emulator? Is glibc a libc emulator?

WINE is another implementation of the Win16 and Win32 APIs (just not a very functional one). Calling it an emulator is silly.

Re:OK... good

[gl4ss]

well even if the knoppix itself doesn't include it i'm pretty sure one of the forks will do it. hell, knoppix might even support it in the future, though it's quite likely that it would be behind some knoppix cheatcode instead of being the default course of action.

Re:OK... good

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the kernel NTFS project is only "write safe". This new project completley supports NTFS functions through the use of the Windows drivers themselves.

"As opposite to other projects this is currently the only software supporting the full read/write access including the possibility to create/delete files, modify directories etc." - from the site of the new project

Re:OK... good

[Sneftel]

Wine does not consist of an emulation layer, a necessary feature of what most people would consider an emulator.

Of course Wine has an emulation layer. What do you think it does when an application calls a win32api function... calls up Redmond and asks what to do?

Re:OK... good

[tiger99]

I must admit that you have a very valid point there. However if it was a Win 2K .dll, it might be good enough for most people. I will never, ever run Win 9x, or any part of it, on anything again, nor will I touch XP, but 2K is mostly OK. Of course you would not want to run anything remotely resembling Windoze on a machine whose function was critical.

A few doubtful things can get into the kernel anyway, some of the more obscure drivers are not very good, and many of us allow a binary Nvidia module, without knowing how good (usually) or bad (sometimes) it might be.

Re:OK... good

[nadolph]

The new linux ntfs driver can do that. I think that this new method, using the windows driver gives you full read write abilities.

Re:OK... good

[olderchurch]

Troubleshooting ok, but for forensic purposes? Why not use the current NTFS implementation in the kernel. The reading of files with the current implementation is excellent, and since you are doing a forensic investigation, the drive is mounted ro anyway.

Re:OK... good

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, not quite. The license is per computer, but only one can sign the EULA. Tread lightly here, but if the computer was loaded by the sysadmin at your job, than the license doesn't necessary stop you. Unfortunately, that is only a small percent of use cases.

Re:OK... good

[hitmark]

why dont we just call it what it is? and what is it? a translator, just like they use in UN and other places when one person cant talk to language of the other person but need to talk to him. wine does not pretend to be windows, it just takes win32 calls and output the matching linux calls...

Re:OK... good

[tiger99]

Well, I will give it 6 months, and then give it a cautious trial on my main PC. Once bitten........

It will get there in the end, of course. I might even do some testing on a spare PC to see what happens, and report any bugs. No point sitting around and waiting, may as well get involved, as long as there is no risk to my real data.

But, the ultimate goal for everyone has to be to get rid of all M$ code, and having competing groups working in this area might not help.

Re:OK... good

[GigsVT]

Won't help with patents.

Re:OK... good

[caluml]

The best thing for Linux would be ntfs2ext2,3,reiserfs, whatever, and a Windows ext2/3/reiserfs driver.
Get people converted to an open filesystem, I say.

Re:OK... good

[teklob]

Maybe the reverse is true also, but I can't think of an example.
games

Re:OK... good

[calidoscope]

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.

Funny you should mention Messy-DOS 1 (earliest version of M$-DOS was 1.25) as 86-DOS had the capability of reading CP/M disks and that feature made to SCP's release of M$-DOS 1.25 after MicroSquat bought 86-DOS from SCP.

N.B. PC-DOS 1.0 was a slightly modified 86-DOS 1.14.

Re:OK... good

[bhtooefr]

It would be a STUPID setup, but Windows on the FAT )because a sysadmin prefers fat over NTFS so he can access it with Linux) and an NTFS for storage? So, you'd also have to mount FAT partitions before loading NTFS.SYS.

Re:OK... good

[Slime-dogg]

No, it isn't an Emulator.

It is, however, a Wrapper! It contains a layer that does some computations that exists between the Windows stuff and the Linux stuff, so it does incur some processor power in addition to memory.

I don't know how efficient it all is, but with 2.4 ghz machines at $500 nowadays, I don't see what the big deal is. Emulator, Wrapper, Whatever.

Re:OK... good

[Kethinov]

The best thing for Linux would be ntfs2ext2,3,reiserfs, whatever, and a Windows ext2/3/reiserfs driver. Get people converted to an open filesystem, I say.

I can read Linux file systems from Windows and I can read Windows file systems from Linux but the write capacity of one to the other is marginal. What we need is to improve on the drivers so that they have full read/write access then write a program that can convert an NTFS hard drive into an ext2/3 hard drive and let Windows boot it. If you could run windows on an ext2/3 partition, it would go a long way toward solving people's dual booting problems.

Re:OK... good

[dre80]

Precisely:
Wine Is Not an Emulator

Re:OK... good

[bhtooefr]

Umm... RAM disk? I would think that Knoppix would use a RAM disk, as it's a live CD...

Re:OK... good

[ultranova]

Wine is a win32 API implementation. Therefore, if Windows are not emulators, then neither is Wine. And if Wine is an emulator, then so are Windows.

Re:OK... good

[Tony-A]

It is absolutely normal in this day and age, even without open source, to need to read and write foreign file systems.

From an old fart, it seems like it has always been essential, at least if you don't want to create a disaster on any kind of conversion project.

Methinks that may well be the primary reason that governments are starting to switch to open source solutions. Their data needs to be readable for decades. (if not forever;)

Re:OK... good

[Phillup]

Chances are that if you need to read/write NTFS drives... you have an OS that put the data on the drives.

More times than not...

Now, why might I need this?

Suppose I'm doing a project in Delphi and Kylix... I may want to scoot over to my NTFS drive to pick up some code I wrote last night to put into the Kylix version... and I don't want to reboot to do it.

I'm still SOL going the other way tho... (of course I have a server that I back both systems up to, and that is how I've "solved" the problem... this reduces the hardware need a bit)

Re:OK... good

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you could run windows on an ext2/3 partition, it would go a long way toward solving people's dual booting problems."

What good is that?
-You would not want to let Windows access the Linux files. So you'd have to hide those files from Windows -> separate partitions.
-You would still want to set up Linux in proper way, ie. splitting the system across few partitions.

Looks to me like the only thing really needed is r/w ext2/3 support fow Windows, but it doesn't have to be able to boot from it. Having all drives ext would also mean that Windows would have to be tricked to thinking its running on fat32 or preferably NTFS. Many programs require NTFS or they refuse to install.

An alternative approach just occurred to me: In a dual boot system, would it be possible to have Windows on NTFS and the other systems ext2/3 and then running some light version of Linux on vmware that mounts the Linux partitions and shares them to the host OS using Samba?

Re:OK... good

[42forty-two42]

Well, that's okay, as long as we still have a recursive acronym: WINE Is Now an Emulator.

Re:OK... good

[schon]

many of us allow a binary Nvidia module, without knowing how good (usually) or bad (sometimes) it might be.

The difference is, of course, that the Nvidia module is written specifically for the Linux kernel.

See what Alexandre Julliard has to say about Windows DLLs.. would you really want this?

Re:OK... good

[Kethinov]

That's all well and good but I don't want to run an NTFS partition if I don't have to because only Windows can write to it. Killing two birds with one stone would be running Windows on an ext partition and Linux and a separate ext partition. Both can talk to eachother that way.

For the record, I dual boot. Windows for games and Linux for everything else.
hda = FAT32 20gb Win2k
hdb = ext3 40gb Gentoo Linux
hdc = NTFS 80gb no operating system

I'd like to make hda and hdc Linux drives that Windows has no problem read/writing to but I can't.

Re:OK... good

[placeclicker]

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO
ARG, the last thing i want is having my dual boot* system's having their Linux partiton wiped out if they get hacked under windows.

* Please dont kill me, i only have windows on them for my family, they complain too much about linux. I'll ease them onto it.

Re:OK... good

[lucas teh geek]

hdc should really be formatted in fat32 so you can use it in both OS's with read/write support

Re:OK... good

[drsmithy]

It is absolutely normal in this day and age, even without open source, to need to read and write foreign file systems.

Ah, while there are certainly quite a few people out there who want to read and write multiple filesystems, I'd hardly call it "normal". "Normal" is something my grandma or a secretary does with their computer.

Re:OK... good

[demon]

It's not an emulator by any accepted definition by anyone who knows about computer science. It's a binary loader with a Win32 ABI. It doesn't have to emulate anything on an x86 system. Now if I run Wine on my PowerBook to run a Win32 binary, _then_ I'm emulating. (Emulating an x86, that is!)

Re:OK... good

[nutznboltz]

Please dont kill me, i only have windows on them for my family, they complain too much about linux. I'll ease them onto it.

Tell them to get their own computer.

Re:OK... good

[dossen]

Quoting the comment you replied to:

...since it uses the lufs kernel module to communicate via a unix socket with the user-land ntfs hack.

The important part is "user-land". The lufs module allows filesystems to be implemented in userspace, so the windows dlls will be running in usermode, no worse than running wine.

Worst case would be that lufs might recieve something wierd, if the ntfs.sys driver makes a mess, but I guess it should be no worse than a bad floppy or cd (I'd be surprised if lufs doesn't either have or will get some sanity checks between the userspace driver and the kernel module).

Re:OK... good

[shaitand]

"Quoting the comment you replied to: ...since it uses the lufs kernel module to communicate via a unix socket with the user-land ntfs hack.

The important part is "user-land". The lufs module allows filesystems to be implemented in userspace, so the windows dlls will be running in usermode, no worse than running wine."

umm ok, here is the full text of the post I was replying to, could you please show me exactly where that quote is contained in it. Perhaps you meant the grandparent which had almost nothing to do with the post I responded to?

" Does it have to be done that way? Is it not possible, given that the Linux kernel can be modified, for a Windoze .dll to be loaded directly in kernel memory space, with a minimal wrapper round it to map linux system calls to the correct dll entry points?

I am not an expert, but all OSs I have ever seen support a fairly standard set of file operations, the mapping should not be overly complex. Or have M$ messed up big time, as usual, and created a messy interface with hundreds of entry points where about 3 would suffice?"

Perhaps you meant the grandparent's post? The post I was replying to was suggesting that we should do this DIRECTLY IN KERNEL space RATHER THAN in USER space. I maintain that loading windows drivers directly into kernel space, whether doable or not, would give us a result that might well actually be LESS stable than windows (hard to imagine that I know, but these drivers aren't stable on the system their designed for! Let alone running via emulation on a foreign kernel!).

Re:OK... good

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is offering ntfs.sys for free on its web page. See this page:

Download details: Update for Microsoft Windows 2000: KB820888

I don't know anything about the license of that file, but it might be useful.

Re:OK... good

[Geek of Tech]

Uh.... this is about giving Linux the ability to reliably read and write to the NTFS file system. If Bill has his way, I don't see Windows being able to modify any form of Linux (other than to remove it) and time soon.

Re:OK... good

[Hooded One]

Analyzing static files is only part of it. You want to be able to look at what changes happen when you write to a file as well.

Re:OK... good

[atrader42]

Obviously, this wouldn't work for NTFS partitions that don't have an actual NT-based O/S installed on it, but if that's the case, why do you have that partition on your HD in the first place?!

Ok, I'll bite. My computer has 3 hard drives. One is an NTFS win2k boot drive. When this got to be too small, I bought another one and added it. It's NTFS too. That got full and I got interested in linux. I now have a 3rd hard drive where the first partition is NTFS and the rest is linux. I use all of it. I'd love to be able to write to all of it.

Re:OK... good

[placeclicker]

See the grandparent.

The one name missing is M$, absolutely none of their stuff recognises any othe OS at all.

Re:OK... good

[MadChicken]

I agree... I remember back in my OS/2 days fully converting to ext2 - it was wonderful. It ran really well and the switch over to Linux was seamless.

Re:OK... good

[KhanAFur]

I run crossover office and it is pretty quick for most anything, about the same as running actually under Windows on the same machine. The only really slow thing I have noticed is when I go to open a file it takes FOREVER to open new directories. The machine I'm using now is pretty quick but I never found it slow running on my old 400MHz Machine.

-Mary

Re:OK... good

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Actually, this level of write support is exactly what is needed to create GNU/Linux distributions that can install on an NTFS partition inside an image file, without repartitioning. Such distributions can provide a "safety net" for users before taking the plunge and installing a real GNU/Linux distribution and ditching windows.

Maybe using the windows NTFS driver this way will help provide enough debug info to complete this driver

True; this is the only reason I found this article interesting (much like the windows NDIS network driver loader) - the fact that it makes reverse-engineering the driver easier for the purposes of writing a Free Software replacement.

Re:OK... good

[prometheus.au]

I remember reading in Australian Personal Computer Magazine a few months back, a review they did on a software package that did allow you to mount ext2 and ext3 partitions under windows 2000 and Windows XP. I can't remember the name of the package, but It was a closed source / proprietary solution. But fuctionality like this is the sort of thing that M$ usually leaves to ISVs...

Re:OK... good

[Graphyx]

Knoppix mounts about 70% of you memory as a RAMdisk for configuration files it creates on the fly, however can it customize the /etc folder to you system?

Re:OK... good

[haralder]

Great!! that's what I was looking for!

My work laptop has win2k with NTFS. Now, I'll be able to make a big file (1GB?), and using this driver, mount it in loopback as an ext2 filesystem, so I can write to disk when using Knoppix.

Re:OK... good

[Xabraxas]

Of course Wine has an emulation layer. What do you think it does when an application calls a win32api function... calls up Redmond and asks what to do?

No. It runs on a re-implementation of the win32 api, not an emulation. An emulator is like a translator, that translates from one api to another. WINE does not do this. It is a re-implementation of DLL's, not a translation.

Re:OK... good

[dossen]

Sorry, It seems that that post was filtered out of my view, sorry about that (I was sure I had it setup to include posts with highly moderated children (I think that was what that option said)). I think we actually agree (at least as far as loading MS drivers into the kernel goes - YUCK!).

Re:OK... good

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, any hacker who can acquire root/Administrators privileges can already do anything with your discs, including wipe out all of your partitions.

The ability of the running OS to understand the partition layout and file systems only matters if the hacker wants to collect data easily (versus grovelling through and analysing it the hard way).

Re:OK... good

[Sneftel]

Right. It's a translation. It takes the GDI calls, for instance, and TRANSLATES them into XLib calls, which it then sends to the X-server. Really, what's so hard about this?

Re:OK... good

[Anonymous Coward]

Win32 is not a standard to be implemented, it is a specific set of operating systems from Microsoft, which is divided into two branches: NT (Windows NT 3.1 through Windows Server 2003) and DOS/Windows (Windows 95 through Windows Me).

There is no Win32 standard, and the goal of WINE is therefore to behave in a way that is compatible with the Microsoft Win32 implementations; which is to say, to emulate them.

A counter-example would be POSIX. Various systems, from Solaris to NT/Interix, implement POSIX. These systems, however, are not emulating one another: the behaviour of POSIX is defined in a standard, which all implementations endeavour to follow. It therefore holds that they are implementations of POSIX, and not emulators.

Ultimately, the issue is what defines the behaviour of a system. If a standard exists as the basis for a how a system behaves, an implementation of that behaviour is not emulation. If, on the other hand, there is no standard, and the behaviour is defined by an existing implementation, or set of implementations, any external implemenation which seeks to duplicate their behaviour is, by definition, emulating them.

Re:OK... good

[downwa]

Actually, WINE implements the Win32 API, as do various versions of Windows, to varying degrees of compatibility. The fact that WINE's implementation is slightly less compatible than, say, Win95's, doesn't mean it is an emulator. Programs make direct calls to WINE just as they would to Win32. Or, they can be recompiled to use winelib, and actually become native Unix apps which happen to use another library.

Re:OK... good

[Xabraxas]

WINE is a binary loader. It is also a re-implementation of Windows DLL. That is it. 95% of WINE is a re-implementation. Install WINE and look for yourself. What little translation is going on is not anything close to emulating all of Windows. It is not an emulator.

Re:OK... good

[Sneftel]

Uh huh. I didn't hear any refutation of my last point.

Let's try this one more time. Operating system services, such as file access and networking, are offered by UNIX, under which WINE runs. WINE allows programs Win32 programs--which are not built to make direct use of those UNIX facilities--to use them anyway, by taking the Win32 calls they make, and translating them into appropriate UNIX calls, which it then passes to the operating system. What's not an emulator about that?

Re:OK... good

[sillybilly]

Actually, the ntfs file system is patented or something. So you can't write anything from scratch that uses ntfs and make it completely free, because unlike copyright, where only the form but not the content is protected, patents block even writing around things. Luckily patents expire in 20 years, while copyright takes lifetime of author + 70 years, or 90 years if corporate authorship. So anyway, what we need instead is a good ext3 driver for windows. Personally, I have 3 major partitions on my disk - win2k ntfs, linux ext3, and a huge common FAT32 partition storing the common data, that both OS's can access and read/write. However, the other day I found out during video recording that FAT32 only supports 4 GB file sizes, so while I'm fine with FAT32 for now, it's clearly gotta go in the future. What I really need is just a way to easily access my data drive from both linux and windows. Also, my portable USB disk is FAT32 too, so it mounts nicely in linux and also in university computers that run windows. Unfortunately even if there were a ext3 driver for windows, I would not have permission to install it on university/library computers. So FAT32 on the USB drive is fine for me now, for a long long time. Not gonna store bigger than 4 gig files there. I seldom use windows anymore, but there are some situations, such as when self-extracting pdf files only come as exe's, where I must reboot just to run those, then right back to linux.

Re:OK... good

[Wolfrider]

--Make sure you use -m1 with mke2fs so you can save on wasted space. :)
Shoot, you might as well make it ext3 and have journal, as well.

Could it be?

[Anonymous Coward]

Teh 1stest?

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

[kasperd]

Surely it is illegal to copy the ntfs.sys driver and distribute it in another operating system

I was thinking exactly the same, but there might be a way around that. Knoppix just have to contain the wrapper code, the actual .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.

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

[gillbates]

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?

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???

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

[swordboy]

So why not use this to create a distro that installs itself onto Windows PCs? I'd use Linux if I didn't have to repartition. Everyone would use Linux if you could install it from inside Windows. Heck, I'm sure someone could come up with an ActiveX applet to install Linux on millions of PCs like spyware does - the user would just click 'yes' because they don't know any better and then their PC could download and install it in the back ground.

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

[stevey]

But the NTFS driver would be on the Windows partition, which would be an NTFS filesystem - right?

So presumably the setup looks like this:

• Mount the NTFS filesystem RO with the normal kernel driver
• Copy the ntfs.sys driver to /tmp
• Unmount the NTFS filesystem
• Mount it RW using the copied driver

Seems to me that either just "stealing" the ntfs.sys driver (wonder if it gets changed by different service packs?) or using the normal kernel one would be far easier.

But then again I don't use Windows so I have no NTFS partitions..

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

[mph]

Everyone would use Linux if you could install it from inside Windows.

For sufficiently small values of "everyone."

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

[Anonymous Coward]

"how to verify intergrity of the ntfs.sys file you are going to load"

Put MD5 sum of original driver(s) and check for it on the Knoppix CD?

Tels

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

[setzman]

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

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.

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

[mystik]

The same way grub or lilo loads linux from a reiserfs or ext2/3 partition --- rudimentary read-only access is coded into the bootloader.

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

[motte_fra]

well I do, and I'm pissed off. This kind of thing can happen when you migrate from xp, w2k, etc... to linux, with important data on an ntfs drive, and no sufficiently big spare disk to copy the data on a linux partition.

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

[Drakin]

There's been a number of versions of Linux that don't require repartioning. It installed like BeOS did... and it never really caught on.

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

[Nevo]

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.

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

[toddestan]

People like me with External hard disks. I'm still at a bit of a loss on how I am supposed to format a 120GB USB2.0 external disk so that it is one large 120GB partition, still have it readable/writeble by Windows 2000, and not use NTFS.

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

[short]

It is already done fully automatically exactly this way during .RPM installation.

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

[op00to]

It has been done.

UMSDOS. Old school.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

it loads it read only from the windows bootloader. There is a very basic ntfs read function in the initial boot files.

this is why infecting those files is something that virii want to do, they always have system level access to everything, even after the system is loaded.

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

[DrSkwid]

30Gb are $30 shut up bitching

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

[Anonymous Coward]

From: http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/doc/R elated.html.pl#LinuxNTFScompet

"Using Linux NTFS for read-only access to existing partition with Microsoft Windows NT installation is implemented for successful acquire of ntfs.sys, ntoskrnl.exe and possibly even fastfat.sys and/or cdfs.sys files from the user's NTFS partition."

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

[Anonymous Coward]

> Surely it is illegal to copy the ntfs.sys driver

Not if you copy your own NTFS.SYS file and use it on the same machine. Copyright law also allows copying for "repair" purposes.

There is a commerical product that does exactly the same thing -- "NTFSDOS Professional" (not the same as the freeware NTFS for DOS) -- and they have not been sued by MS.

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

[drinkypoo]

If your ntfs.sys file is in sequential blocks on the filesystem then it should be fairly easy to construct a tool which will run on windows and give you an offset and a length which you can use to read the file from the disk. Hence all you should have to do is defrag, run the tool, and move on. NTFS5 may also have a contiguous block file method, so you could just write a copy of it, and pick that up. You could also use a flash drive, floppy, zip drive, etc to move the file over. It might also be possible to load it from a patch, like the service pack, assuming it has been updated at some point, but picking it up from the user's system is best.

If it would work with Win2k NTFS.SYS then on 2k systems you could use the kernel-included read-only driver, with some patching. I don't know if anyone has that driver reading XP's NTFS, which is probably not substantially different than 2k's NTFS.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Format it as FAT32 under another OS (Linux or Win98). Windows will recoginize large FAT volumes, it just won't let you create them.

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

[short]

It is already done exactly this way: w32-mod-id.captivemodid.xml

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

[tepples]

Can't FAT32 go up to a terabyte?

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

[adrianbaugh]

In a similar way to how Linux loads reiserfs.o - from an initrd - I imagine. Though I suspect this may lead Microsoft to build Longhorn's filesystem support into the kernel rather than being a module, that way this whole hack gets stopped.

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

[caseih]

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).

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

[pyros]

make the one-time investment in partition magic. boot off the CD and convert it from ntfs to ext2 or ext3.

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

[toddestan]

I might have to try that again. Last time I messed around with Windows 98, fdisk wouldn't let me create very large partitions. Actually, fdisk just doesn't play will with larger drives. I also have a somewhat dated copy of Partition Magic (5.0?), that only lets me create FAT32 partitions of silghtly over 60GB, without spitting out errors.

Perhaps I'll try booting Knoppix just too see what happens. I just got another 80GB external drive that I haven't put anything on yet, so I can expirement around without the risk of losing data on the drive.

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

[ncc74656]

Format it as FAT32 under another OS (Linux or Win98). Windows will recoginize large FAT volumes, it just won't let you create them.

FAT32 only allows files up to 2 GB each...depending on your intended use, that could be a problem. (One hour of video ripped from my TiVo, for instance, takes about 2.5 GB.) NTFS allows much larger files...don't know how much larger offhand (probably a few terabytes), but I've had no problem working with Huffyuv AVIs up to around 30 GB or so.

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

[Jheaden]

It may very well go up to a terabyte but Microsoft in there infinite wisdom will not allow you to format a partition FAT32 if it is beyond a certain size ( I believe the size was like 32GB ).

Note that this is true at least on WinXP, don't know about 2000, etc.

The only reason I know this is because I ran into this very problem at home where I needed WinXP as well as Linux.

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

[cain]

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.

Surely it is illegal to remove the tires from a chevy and put them on another car, seeing as how it is a part of a Ford.

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

[facelessnumber]

Use FAT32. Then you're not limited even by which version of Windows you plug it into. Windows 2000 and XP can't (won't, actually) format a FAT32 parition over 32gb. But they can both read and use a larger one just fine. Theoretically, I've read that you can fdisk and format a bigger parition with a Win98/ME boot disk, but I tried that and for some reason I couldn't do it. However, I did this a couple of days ago on a 80gb partition...

Boot Knoppix, a Gentoo LiveCD, or somesuch other Linux that's running with that drive unmounted...

Run fdisk, make a partition of Win95 type b or c. (I'm not sure if both work; I used LBA and it did fine; I think that's c) Then...

mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/(your parition)

After that, I mounted it as /storage, then booted into Windows and used a little-known option in Disk Manager to mount the new partition in a directory. (c:\storage) Now I have a place where I can read/write under Windows, Linux, VMWare or even a 9x boot disk. It's not a particularly fast filesystem under Linux, but great for playing MP3s and movies, and nothing's going to really fly on USB.

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

[darien]

People keep saying this, but I've got 4Gb files on my FAT32 XP system. (That seems to be the maximum though.)

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

[perlchild]

It would be however, illegal for knoppix to put such a file on a cd they redistributed, which was the main point.
it's legal for YOU, as the owner of ntfs, to copy this driver to another medium for YOUR use. It's NOT however, ok to distribute this file with gpl code. As for NTFSDOS pro, the software is marketed as a file-recovery tool, which makes it useful to Microsoft(as it might prevent users migrating servers off Windows because such a crucial tool was not available and they lost files...), and the company develops win32 software(which means they most likely licensed the ntfs.sys driver, or paid enough microsoft tax not to be bothered by microsoft lawyers unless they make a BLATANT mistake)
knoppix could distribute the reaktos part, but not the nfts.sys driver, and that would mean knoppix would have to get a way to read this on your computer. Either you would copy it to floppy, add the file to the knoppix iso yourself before burning, or it would be available on a mounted(not-ntfs) partition. But in short, while YOU can do something, doesn't mean you can always ask someone to do it for you... In this case, knoppix cannot distribute the ntfs.sys except to people who already have it... And since versioning is also an issue(there are several versions of ntfs) they would also need to distribute several versions to satisfy everyone.
FIRE, LNX-BBC and other "rescue" linux distros would be a better fit for the ntfs.sys driver inclusion in many cases.

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

[Webmonger]

a. Knoppix doesn't use RPM.
b. Applying the kernel changes needs to happen before the CD image is created, but copying the file needs to happen during system startup.

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

[croddy]

mandrake "use free space on windows partition"

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

[MCZapf]

If you must partition in DOS, try using Free FDISK. As the name indicates, it's free, and supports more than the fdisk from MS. (The UI is pretty much the same, though.)

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

[Anonymous Coward]

while a might be true, b is certainly not.
ram can be changed, thus the kernel could be modified on the fly

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

[mess31173]

Actually the maximum size for a FAT32 partition is 2TB (Terrabytes). The maximum size for a FAT16 partition is 2GB.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhhh... Tolkien is a he !!

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

[Tony-A]

FAT32 only allows files up to 2 GB each

You're thinking FAT16 (DOS/WIN95/NT compatible)
FAT32 is unreadable by DOS, NT, WIN95 (later versions of 95 might)
FAT32 is readable by WIN98, 2000, XP and of course by any recent Linux (and I would assume BSD)

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

[mess31173]

Maximum file size: 4 GB minus 1 byte (232 bytes minus 1 byte)
Maximum volume size: 32 GB (OS implementation)
Files per volume: 4,177,920
Maximum number of files and subfolders within a single folder: 65,534 (The use of long file names can significantly reduce the number of available files and subfolders within a folder.)

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure if you want to fux0rs your data incredibly. PARTITION TRAGIC.

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

[juniorkindergarten]

It is more than that, as I just setup a friends dual boot machine on a 120G drive split 50/50 win98/linux.

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

[ncc74656]

Actually the maximum size for a FAT32 partition is 2TB (Terrabytes). The maximum size for a FAT16 partition is 2GB.

You're confusing partitions and files. I said the maximum filesize under FAT32 was 2 GB. Someone else said it might be 4 GB under WinNT/2K/XP, but either way it's far smaller than what NTFS allows.

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

[adrianbaugh]

Er, count the quotation characters. The whole thing is a quotation, written by Tolkien. Context makes it obvious that 'she' is Galadriel referring to herself, but the author of the quotation is Tolkien.

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

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think Windows keeps enough ability in its bootloader to at least be able to read that file. I think WNT, W2k and XP all keep a tiny six or so megabyte partition to hold the bootloader, etc.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

you know you shouldnt use flash storage with fat32
(incase you do - because usb2 would be fast enough)
uses a special byte somewhere and modifies it everytime a file is written etc, since this is always the same byte it will get destroyed way before all the other logic gates on the chip rendering it and without special remapping the whole device useless

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

[Webmonger]

While it's possible to change the kernel on the fly, it's very hard to get right. Using the built-in modules functionality is the only easy way to achieve that.

And why would you want to recompile build tools, build dependencies and such every time you start up, when you could do it once and be done with it?

It's nonsensical to install it from scratch on system startup. The alternative (copy a file from a read-only NTFS then remount) is faster and easier.

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

[LoveTheIRS]

It isn't illegal to remove the tires from a chevy and put them on a ford, as long as you own the chevy and the ford. In this case, those who own a Windoze and therefore ntfs.sys can use this hack. Those who don't own the ntfs.sys can't use one. You can't distribute an ntfs.sys because that would be taking the tires off every chevy that you didn't own and putting them on every ford that you give away, or sell for profit. (Which is stealing) And with this SCO stuff we can't afford to have those kinds of rumors flying around. We're going to be a great OS on our own steam.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The same way grub or lilo loads linux from a reiserfs or ext2/3 partition --- rudimentary read-only access is coded into the bootloader.

grub works that way, but lilo doesn't understand the filesystem. When lilo is installed, it stores the location of the kernel as a list of disk blocks (this is why you have to re-run lilo when you change the kernel).

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

[Zeriel]

Format it as FAT32 using Win98SE or Linux...I believe FAT32 supports up to 137GB partitions but I could be off-base--the FAT32 formatter in Win2k is purposefully limited to 32GB partitions.

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

[RoLi]

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.

If you need NTFS-support you already have it on your harddrive, so no problems taking it right off the disk.

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

[pyros]

I've never once had any data loss using partition magic, in 5 years of use.

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

[typobox43]

Of course, 99% of users with an NTFS partition own a copy of Windows with ntfs.sys...

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, flash storage today is smart enough to remap sectors on demand. Basically every digital camera nowadays uses FAT16, so something had to be done to prevent premature wearing out of flash chips.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

FAT32 volume can be up to 2 TB. I doubt anyone today would want to use volumes of this size formatted as FAT32.

But there are other issues as well: while 120GB FAT32 volumes formatted under Linux work nice under Windows 2000/XP, they don't work so nice under Linux. It takes eternity writing large files (let's say 1 or 2 GB) under Linux. It seems to be CPU bound (load 1.0 writing file????).

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

[Loki_1929]

"Windows 2000 and XP can't (won't, actually) format a FAT32 parition over 32gb."

Sure they will; just not during setup. Check in the disk administrator instead once you have the OS up and running.

"Theoretically, I've read that you can fdisk and format a bigger parition with a Win98/ME boot disk, but I tried that and for some reason I couldn't do it."

Your system's BIOS probably wasn't detecting the drive's size correctly. This has nothing to do with the software used. Aside from this, Symantec's gdisk (included with Ghost) works far more efficiently and predictably than fdisk. I've used fdisk on 40GB drives before, and I've used gdisk (simple DOS program) to format 120s.

"Run fdisk, make a partition of Win95 type b or c. (I'm not sure if both work; I used LBA and it did fine; I think that's c)"

I can't recall the last time I played with partitioning in Linux (I'm more of a FreeBSD person myself) but some of this just doesn't make sense to me. First of all, Windows 95B and C both used FAT32 for partitions larger than 2GB. LBA, on the other hand, generally refers to how the size of a hard disk is asessed by software (usually the BIOS). Modern hard disks all require LBA due to the fact that we don't have drives with 100 cylinders running around.

"After that, I mounted it as /storage, then booted into Windows and used a little-known option in Disk Manager to mount the new partition in a directory. "

It's hardly 'hidden' or 'secretive'. Rather, it's simply an option checkbox when you format a drive (known as a 'volume' under 2k/XP) in the disk administrator.

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

[kasperd]

Put MD5 sum of original driver(s) and check for it on the Knoppix CD?

That is also what I would do (except that I might choose SHA1 rather than MD5), but the problem is, how do you know the MD5 sum of every possible version of that file with wich the driver works. What about the day you try to use your CD on a system which have a new version of the .sys file released after your CD?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably need to partition under NT, and format under DOS. NT doesn't always like fdisk partitions anyways.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

A Slackdotter - One who reads /. at work instead of doing anything productive.

I don't have a job, you insensitive clod!

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

[Anonymous Coward]

NTFSDOS Pro works the way others are describing -- it uses it's own reverse-engineered Read Only driver, reads your NTFS.SYS file off your filesystem and then uses that to mount the filesystem Read-Write.

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

[afidel]

God I hope not. That would also break NTFS4DOS, the sysadmin's best friend. For practical purposes it would probably mean going back to FAT(32) for boot volumes.

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

[waynemcdougall]

Wow.

It's like the computer pulls itself up by it's own boot straps.

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

[facelessnumber]

"Sure they will; just not during setup. Check in the disk administrator instead once you have the OS up and running."

If this can be done, I'm very surprised and would be curious to know the circumstances. The inability to do exactly what you just decribed is the whole reason I did it the way I did. Actually I tried it that way on both 2k and XP. I'm not calling you a liar, but if you can do this, please tell me exactly how and it will save me some steps in the future.

"Windows 95B and C both used FAT32"

When I said "b" and "c" I was referring to partition types in Linux fdisk- these are hex codes. (ex: 83 is "Linux" and 82 is "Linux Swap," though I may have that backwards) The difference between these two types (b&c) is LBA support.

"It's hardly 'hidden' or 'secretive'."

Didn't say either; just that it's "little known." The way the newly-converted talk about 'NIX filesystems being able to mount partitions as directories leads me to believe they didn't know this could be done in Windows. (DOS too, actually.) It's certainly not hidden, but I don't think it's well-known.

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

[nutznboltz]

Everyone would use Linux if you could install it from inside Windows.

Everyone would use Linux if MicroSoft called it Windows.

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

[sokk]

With all the patches these days, wouldn't it be possible to recreate Windows almost entirely from service packs and patches?

Make a bootable linux-cdrom that contains all the references to the files. Download them, stich them together and add artwork. Voila, your own Windows ;)

- I don't know how legal it is though.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

...and 99% of Linux users use Windows > 95% of the time.

Kinda wonder why we have linux at all, hunh? ;-)

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

[The Original Atrox]

You are most correct sir... You dont -have- to change the kernel on the fly... this binary workarround useing the ntfs.sys driver is in user-land... Use the Open Read-Only NTFS driver to mount the NTFS partition read-only (which Knoppix does per default)... and then give the user the -option- to remount read/write, useing the ntfs.sys that they have on one of thier partitions (suposedly) at which point some automated script looks it up, CPs it into the RAM drive, and does the workaround magic on it, allowing the NTFS partition to now be remounted read/write.... Viola... first time linux users useing Knoppix can now write thier NTFS drives reliably.

Microft

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

[jshare]

+1 Funny

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

[mst76]

> If you need NTFS-support you already have it on your harddrive, so no problems taking it right off the disk.

Not necessarily. You may have formatted a (removable) harddisk with ntfs just to store data.

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

[DerPflanz]

...then loads the kernel and the HAL.

I don't think I can do that, Dave.

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

[Zeriel]

Yeah, the Linux Fat32 driver is about on par with the Win98 driver, not the NT-based ones.

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

[Wolfrider]

--You *do* make BACKUPS of this "important data"... Don't you?

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

[sirReal.83.]

This past week I just lost 40GB of data. About 10GB was irreplaceable. It destroyed my ext3 partition when I was resizing it. I tried all manor of recovery, including hexdump/grepping for superblocks and using them in fsck. Nothing. I ended up reformatting.

Hopefully I've learned my lesson about backups. At least now I'm keeping /home on a separate partition from / .

What is this good for?

[scumbucket]

Maybe to open all your MS Word and Excel files using OpenOffice?

Re:What is this good for?

[jared_hanson]

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.

Re:What is this good for?

[ShavenYak]

Actually, I have another use for it. Back when I had a Win98 dual-boot box, I could run Quake III under Linux with a symlink for the PAK0.PK3 file pointing to my FAT32 partition. On my current XP/Linux box with an NTFS partition, it didn't work - I had to copy the file to my ext3 partition, wasting a scad of diskspace. I'm guessing that QIII opens the .PK3 files r/w and errors out if that fails.

Re:What is this good for?

[mrjive]

I got tired of only having read-only access to my old NTFS partition, so I ended up doing a hack of a workaround: Share the drive under my windows vmware instance, and then mount it as smbfs in read/write mode. Not elegant, but it works.

Re:What is this good for?

[amembleton]

If this friend moved over to Linux and removed Windows, then they will loose ntfs.sys and will no longer be able to access their NTFS partition.

In other words they'll always need Windows and will never be able to fully migrate.

Re:What is this good for?

[jared_hanson]

Presumably, if one were going to completly switch to Linux, they would take their files with them over to the new system. Hence, no need for ntfs.sys. Copying files to a CD and then on to Linux (whatever fs) would be the easiest part of the transition.

EFS ?

[Anonymous Coward]

does it also do EFS ? NTFS compression ? ACLs ?

First?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:First?

[drinkypoo]

When did Open Source simply become a way to avoid paying for Windows?

When windows became the dominant operating system.

Re:First?

[Bandman]

All of this is a complete waste of time though. When did Open Source simply become a way to avoid paying for Windows?

I think Open Source was more a way of having access to your materials the way you need to. Chances are if you want to read/write an NTFS partition, you've got a machine running Windows, or accessing something that Windows has been working with.

Grow up.

Re:First?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Open Source was more a way of having access to your materials the way you need to.

You're right, sort of. What does that have to do with this project, though? Think about it; what use is such a project? Use a Free OS to run a proprietery driver to access a proprietery filesystem format, which they can then use to read and write their proprietery Microsoft Office documents using their copy of the proprietery Microsoft Office XP via. wine. That's hardly a "big win" for Open Source, is it? Lets be honest now; that is simply using Linux to not be Windows.

Lets bear in mind that solutions already exist to the problem of sharing data between Linux and Windows. You can use a FAT32 partition which is readable and writable by both. You can use a read-only NTFS driver for Linux, or an ext2fs file manager in Windows. Last but not least you can use a remote file server via. SMB or NFS under both enviroments.

While I can't help but be impressed by the "neat hack" value of this, I also dislike Open Source (Specically Linux) being used by some sections of the userbase as some sort of bastardised not-Windows. What's the point?

Re:First?

[adrianbaugh]

*boggle* If you're in a position to find this hack useful you already have an NTFS partition which means you pretty much certainly have NT. Windows is already bought and paid for, dude.

Re:First?

[xenocide2]

All of this is a complete waste of time though. When did Open Source simply become a way to avoid paying for Windows?

Shortly after Wired decided that Linux was the Desktop Savior. You'll notice Wired is hardly unbiased when it comes to technological issues. Instead they try to find small nuggets of future trends and cater to them, resulting in an amplification and a self fullfilling prophesy. They had a long going series on MP3 files and how revolutionary it was to steal music. Of course this doesn't always work and we end up with short lived propaganda about DNA computing and biological chips.

Biological chips are hardly computational. In nature those devices are experimental tools--they aid in the process of experimentation. They are one shot devices to indicate the presence of a wide variety of DNA samples. They will not make your computer think harder, faster or cheaper. But it was a new angle on "computing," and they have a readership to keep.

Re:First?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is even better than open source. We let Microsoft foot the bill on all the standardizing and consolidation in the industry, then reap the benefits of their drivers. You may not be able to distribute ntfs.sys but who cares? who wants it? I don't. I do, however, want proprietary DX9/GL2.0 drivers for X/DRI to work now, not 3 years from now, when specs are released. I want my crap printer to work now. I want my wireless 10g card to work now.

All of these drivers I can download for free, but they are windows only.

What should I do? Buy better hardware that supports Open source? I can't afford it. I have el-cheapo crap hardware, with windows only drivers. Should I just use windows then?

What abou WinModems? Even they require some microsoft emulation to work. This is just one piece of hardware that is dependent on windows. By not supporting windows in linux, linux loses a lot of device support. Due to the nature of these device's dependence on windows, linux must emulate windows somewhere.

Windows driver emulation/loaders ARE a just cause for open source. Anything that gives linux better hardware support is good, IMO.

Re:First?

[Zeriel]

The point is freedom of choice. If someone uses all Microsoft software except for the base OS, which is linux (the scenario you described), that's a win for linux and a loss for Windows. Also, a person running Office XP on Wine(X)/CrossoverOffice is probably much more likely to switch to OpenOffice fulltime, just as I'm more likely to run linux full-time if I have access to my NTFS partitions read-write reliably.

Finally, a VERY valid point is that Windows costs anywhere from $50 to $300ish for a desktop or pro edition. That's cash in the bank if I use Linux, even if I subsequently waste said cash on Office XP.

Re:First?

[Ancil]

When did Open Source simply become a way to avoid paying for Windows?

It didn't. But a lot of people want to use Linux to do productive work. Work which has nothing to do with kernel development, or writing your own drivers, or GNOME programming. You might consider that kind of stuff a "complete waste of time," but it's how your parents pay your college tuition.

A lot of hardware will never have drivers for anything other than Windows. Is it a "waste of time" to let people use this hardware on their Linux machines?

dont think so

[Anonymous Coward]

Knoppix wouldn't and couldn't have a non free driver shipping with it
Nice hack though. I will try it out

Definitely not going to be in Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

How would Knoppix and "not free" work together? Last time I checked, Knoppix didn't include a Windows license.

Re:Definitely not going to be in Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe your brain wouldn't bleed so much if you kept your finger out of your nose.

Re:Definitely not going to be in Knoppix

[shaitand]

scroll up a lil bit and read the 4000 posts already answering this.

Re:Definitely not going to be in Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh... dumass... Ill think u'll find that there are no more then 354 comments as per now, not including this 1. If some1 posts a comment after this 1, itll be nymber 356.

Re:Definitely not going to be in Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh... dumass...

Oh, the irony.

Re:Definitely not going to be in Knoppix

[shaitand]

ok I confess, there were only 352 comments answering the question before he posted.

In other news...

[jamonterrell]

A vulnerability has been found in the latest version of knoppix. The vulnerability exploits one of several bugs found in NTFS.SYS and allows any user with access to the drive to render the system useless(moreso than simply using NTFS.SYS already does).

Re:In other news...

[42forty-two42]

A vulnerability has been found in the latest version of knoppix. [...] allows any user with access to the drive to render the system useless

Dude. sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda is sufficient as-is - knoppix lets you get root easily and trash the drives from there.

Hackeroo!

[MarkWPiper]

Maybe it could use the existing ntfs vfs to get the ntfs.sys of the partition, and then load it.

You hit it...

[lukewarmfusion]

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.

Re:You hit it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they fire your lame ass for disobedience

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

[chrismcdirty]

But its Windows. So most people who install it, or, in reality, most people who buy computers with Windows preinstalled, have the standard Windows directories used. And if it isn't in a certain folder in the Windows base directory, Windows can't find it anyway. So it's just a matter of finding the base directory, and grabbing it from there.

Re:Knoppix

[homer_ca]

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.

Re:Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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

Something like this is probably the only way to do it in a Linux distro without having Micro$oft lawyers fall on the distro authors like a ton of bricks. After all, with this method the user already has (presumably) paid for the DLL.

Of course the license (which few bother to read completely) may well have restrictions forbidding the use of Windows components outside Windows. Or if it does not already have, it soon will, if this kind of usage becomes common.

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.

Re:Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

You could also parse the /ntfs/boot.ini file for the location of the Windows system directory to avoid using hardcoded /winnt and the like.

Re:Knoppix

[adrianbaugh]

Who on earth would have an ntfs partition unless they were running NT (or XP)? In which case they have the DLL. It's pretty much a case of "if you need the DLL, you already have it".

Re:Knoppix

[shaitand]

Please refer to the 4000 posts above which already answer this question.

First you have it more or less right, however it's a .sys not a .dll. If the user has an NTFS partition I'd say it's fairly likely they have a windows OS that supports ntfs and therefore they have ntfs.sys somewhere ;)

Fsckin' Great...

[DeionXxX]

That's just great, I don't think there is a more annoying thing when dual-booting than not to be able to share files between the goddamn installations. Hopefully with this, each OS won't feel like it's on a different part of the goddamn universe.

BTW 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? I never took too much time to look into it because it wasn't too much of a problem for me.

--D3X
NeoX3.com: Free of Clothes and Free of Charge

Re:Fsckin' Great...

[hawkstone]

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?

Yep! That's actually the recommended approach I found several times. Not great, but it works. I've got a FAT32 shared partition on my dual-boot laptop right now, in fact.

Re:Fsckin' Great...

[IWorkForMorons]

That's all I've done. The "media" partition of my drive is FAT32, so that I can use it under Linux and Windows. Don't know how performance is affected, but it seems to work fine for me.

Re:Fsckin' Great...

[proctorg76]

yes, that's exactly right. I've got one ntfs partition for windows and all my program files that'll have to be reinstalled anyway if windows goes down, a very large fat32 partition for all my "legitimate backup copies" of my cds and dvds, and then a small reiser for gentoo

Re:Fsckin' Great...

[ImpTech]

Meh, after a while of hassling with fat32 drives and ro ntfs support, I just decided that I don't really care about whats on the windows drive. It pretty much just exists to run a few games, so I keep all the important stuff on an ext3 (gives me at least a little read support in windows), and just use Linux for most everything. If the windows drive explodes, or if the windows installation craps out, who cares? Just a bunch of game files which I can always bring back from cd.

Re:Fsckin' Great...

[blixel]

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.

Re:Fsckin' Great...

[ArghBlarg]

Hey blixel, could you please email me what kernel/ohci driver versions/hw config you're using to mount multiple firewire drives successfully in Linux? I'm running 2.4.20 on a dual PPro mobo with an OHCI-compliant card and my system locks hard if there is more than one Firewire drive attached (seems to happen when copying data between them).

Did you install newer ohci drivers from sourceforge or what? I'd love to know.

Thanks!

Re:Fsckin' Great...

[blixel]

I'm running 2.4.20 on a dual PPro mobo with an OHCI-compliant card and my system locks hard if there is more than one Firewire drive attached

Bah... my bad. My external drives are Firewire/USB 2.0 and are plugged in via the USB cable. Sorry. If I remember correctly, when I tried plugging them in via the firewire cable/port, I would just get a bunch of incomprehensible (to me) device error messages.

I do have an iPod though that mounts without any problem via firewire.

I was running RedHat 9 with the stock kernel but a couple of weeks ago I decided to install Fedora Core 1. I'm currently using the stock Fedora kernel (version 2.4.22-1.2115.nptl).

Re:Fsckin' Great...

[tekunokurato]

That's how I do it. Install progs on the partition for each system, and keep a third partition (or drive, if I had multiple drives or whatnot) on fat. I don't think it works with xp though, but it does on 2000.

Re:Fsckin' Great...

[Clover_Kicker]

>BTW How did people get around this issue before Read/Write access to NTFS?

I've got an old machine that I use as a server.

Commonly used files are shared with both Samba and NFS, so I can get at them from whatever OS I'm booted to. The vast majority of files are OS-specific and don't need to be shared.

My email and documents live on the server, and are always available. I don't need to edit /etc/fstab from Windows, and when I'm booted into Linux I don't need to access my Diablo savegames.

OT: Does anyone know how to put a Mozilla profile on a network drive and share it between *nix and Win32? I'd love to have my bookmarks kept up-to-date between both OSs.

Re:Fsckin' Great...

[Hobbex]

My system used to lock hard after a random amount of time when I used a Firewire drive (my ipod) in 2.4.20, but going to 2.4.21 fixed it (the system still locks suddenly, but now the lock releases after 2-10 seconds and everything comes back).

How about the other way around

[October_30th]

Is there any free-as-beer software for Windows that would let me access (rw) my ext2 and ext3 partitions from Windows?

Re:How about the other way around

[homer_ca]

Merry Christmas. Here you go:

Explore2fs

Re:How about the other way around

[SharpFang]

I did a search and yes, there is.
The driver to mount them is pretty much alpha and not really useful, but there's an explorer-like app that allows you to access e2fs files without really mounting the volume (i.e. it's not system-wide accessible, you can just export/import files) and it works quite OK. I don't remember the names, STFW "access ext2 from FAT" or similar

Re:How about the other way around

[Anonymous Coward]

sure there is. i've been using explore2fs, rather useful tool!

Re:How about the other way around

[Anonymous Coward]

explore2fs is quite nice.

Re:How about the other way around

[richie2000]

Sure.

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...

Re:How about the other way around

[Phlux]

another one...

http://www.it.fht-esslingen.de/~zimmerma/softwar e/ ltools.htm

Re:How about the other way around

[ivan256]

I would *strongly* recommend doing a backup before trying any of the code from the ext2fsd project on sourceforge.

Re:How about the other way around

[worldcitizen]

Not exactly what you want but still useful r-tt's R-Linux is read-only (doesn't have write capabilities) but it can access damaged partitions. It is free (as in beer, not speech)

Re:How about the other way around

[richie2000]

Good point. Actually, I'd recommend a backup before trying *any* new file system code that has write abilities.

Re:How about the other way around

[CrayzyJ]

The readme for this claims it is not quite cooked all the way.

Re:How about the other way around

[jensend]

Why? It's RO by default. If you are going to set it RW then you will definitely want a backup. BTW it doesn't understand journaling, so it won't let you try to write to ext3.

Re:How about the other way around

[jensend]

I'm pretty sure there isn't yet any software for Windows which understands the ext3 journal, so you'll only find read only drivers for it. By far the best driver I've seen is the one I link to in my sig- ext2fsd. Takes a bit of tweaking to install, but works quickly, seamlessly, and, in my (readonly) experience, flawlessly. Other drivers I tried would crash all the time. Remember- before you use any windows ext2 driver in rw mode, be sure to back up your data.

Re:How about the other way around

[athakur999]

There is also Explore2fs, which gives you read only access to your ext2/ext3 partitions:

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs. htm

I've used it several times without any drama. It's a little clunky to use and pretty slow, but it does the job.

Re:How about the other way around

[ivan256]

Don't underestimate the damage it can do to your windows installation.

Re:How about the other way around

[julesh]

I would *strongly* recommend doing a backup before trying any of the code from the ext2fsd project on sourceforge.

I'd also strongly recommend fscking your disk before trying it. I've had _very_ bizarre behaviour out of it on corrupted disks, including immediate reboots without going to blue screen. There is a version of e2fsck that can run on NT floating around somewhere...

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.

Re:What about users/permissions?

[SClitheroe]

No kidding, that's the first thing I thought of... I can't imagine this hack provides any of the security functionality at all, and that should send shivers down any Linux user's spine.

Why wuold you install Linux, and then go ahead and mount what will essentially end up being a world-writeable volume? Other than for emergency or migration purposes, this makes no sense to me at all.

Re:What about users/permissions?

[Lehk228]

"emergency or migration purposes" Exactly That, the point is not that it will serve as a convenient way to store everyday files, it is good for fixing a messed up XP install or getting files you need under linux.

Re:What about users/permissions?

[Clover_Kicker]

>Ownership, permissions, sharing, all that stuff

That horse has been out of the barn for years. Once I have physical access to a computer, I can boot from an NTFSDOS floppy or CDROM and ignore all NTFS security.

This doesn't make things less secure. It may remind people that without physical security, there is no data security.

Re:What about users/permissions?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can also install a second copy of Windows and bypass all the ACL security. It's not intended to stop physical access -- use encryption instead.

Re:What about users/permissions?

[drzhivago]

I could see possibly needing to fix something on an NTFS drive, but wouldn't the case of migrating files already be solved by the read-only NTFS driver?

Re:What about users/permissions?

[SClitheroe]

Except that for recovery situations, there are better tools available both shipped with XP, and via third party. Using the right tool for the job always applies, particularly in emergency situations.

Re:What about users/permissions?

[short]

Permissions are handled by Captive implementation of SeAccessCheck().
It permits always everything (just respecting the UNIX rights).

Re:What about users/permissions?

[jhoffoss]

What about the flipside: could you implement this driver somehow so that it followed permissions at some level? Can you modify nfts permissions from Linux? (Never messed with this...) Does windows have any problem if I were to create a file on an NTFS partition from Linux and then move to Windows? In this situation, what are the default permissions for any files created? (Wide open, inherited, etc.)

Re:What about users/permissions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, security is only as good as the weakest link. In my case it would be the front door to my Uni-bomber style shack here in the deep woods.

Re:What about users/permissions?

[Clover_Kicker]

hahaha, my kingdom for some mod points.

Re:What about users/permissions?

[Dr. Manhattan]

I can't imagine this hack provides any of the security functionality at all, and that should send shivers down any Linux user's spine.

Well, if you allow random users write access to partitions, then yeah, you don't have any security. If you set things up rationally, so that only root can mount the partitions, then you don't have to worry about users messing with the data without authorisation. Mount it with a particular uid & gid (e.g. group "Windows-enabled-users") and let Linux's permission system sort it out.

How exactly is this any less secure than a typical recovery disk? If someone has physical access to the machine, you're screwed anyway. Does the fact that there exist ext2 readers in Windows send shivers up your spine, too?

Re:What about users/permissions?

[Clover_Kicker]

what are the default permissions for any files created?

A good question, I dunno. This is complicated stuff.

could you implement this driver somehow so that it followed permissions at some level

I'm sure you could, but I can think of several problems.

What if the users/groups on the NTFS partition don't match those on my *nix box? For example my /etc/groups doesn't include a "power users" group, and I bet yours doesn't either.

If I were implementing this, I'd make it able to read anything, and any files created would be r/w for everyone.

I think the most common use of r/w NTFS drivers would be rescue CDs and such. If I'm booting a rescue CD to fix a forgotten "administrator" password, I'd be pretty steamed if my rescue CD honoured the permissions I was trying to get around!

Re:What about users/permissions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, what sort of kingdom do you have ??

Re:What about users/permissions?

[jfmiller]

This is part of the FAQ

The program uses Linux Userland File System (LUFS) which "moves the filesystem implementation to UNIX userland where the Microsoft Windows filesystem is completely unarmed by Captive jail of chroot(2), setuid(2) and setrlimit(2)."

I hope this answers the question.

JFMILLER

Re:What about users/permissions?

[SharpFang]

I can imagine using the same Windows database, simply accessing the same database file on Linux and Windows, just like ntfs.sys.

Re:What about users/permissions?

[__aawavt7683]

The only problem I see with this is the writing of file permissions. This inhibbits all writing, by its nature. While reading is easy (nothing needs to be modified, just grab the data), writing would at least require an owner and basic security settings. For this, I was thinking just a few days ago that it would never happen. Except, of course, if you simply wrote _everything_ as administrator. If that wasn't the case, it would be extremely difficult to determine whom is what and so on. It would in effect be emulating most of Windows' registry reading, security file interpretation, etc. Might as well just run windows.

However, I can see how it would work simply writing giving basic things such as administrator read access, or perhaps the everyone group. I believe the administrator account, at least, has a relatively fixed ID (based on boot floppies being able to reset the admin passwd -- but that's a different area, so perhaps not).

But, this is something I'd be interested in learning more about. Comments welcome.

-DrkShadow

Re:What about users/permissions?

[dstutz]

Amen to that. I recently learned about passing "single" as a kernel option via grub and it automatically logs you in to root on the machine. If you have physical access to (just about) any machine you can basically breathe on it and root it.

I am that much dumber for having read...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I think that soon after that we'll see Klaus Knopper finding his Kraut ass stuck with a Microsoft (R) Lawsuit

"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.

Re:"Secret" software is a real problem for OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it illegal?

Re:"Secret" software is a real problem for OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

At least with QuickTime, it's not illegal at all -- Linux devs use APIs that are provided by Apple for 3rd party players.

What's probably technically illegal is mplayer distributing the codec files from their homepage.

Re:"Secret" software is a real problem for OSS

[adrianbaugh]

Illegal if you have software patents, maybe, but that doesn't mean everywhere.

Re:"Secret" software is a real problem for OSS

[minus_273]

Real? obviously you have never heard of the linux realone player or about the open source helix player.

Re:"Secret" software is a real problem for OSS

[aminorex]

"illegal"

You keep using this word. I do not think it
means what you think it means.

Re:"Secret" software is a real problem for OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Real support is still unavailable, but Quicktime and WMV are both supported by FFMPEG, and therefore by MPlayer. Quicktime audio is not supported, but most new Quicktime videos use AAC audio, which is well supported. There is always the rare company that releases Free Software drivers for their hardware, but in general, I would rather have a company release good hardware documentation without an NDA so that other developers can create high-quality Free Software drivers, rather than releasing non-free drivers that have no useful purpose other than to be reverse-engineered (*cough*NVidia*cough*).

I wonder...

[hookedup]

With the advent of 'WinFS', and now NTFS on linux..how long until we see a 'NixFS'

From what i've read about WinFS, a *nix 'version' would be quite nice.

Re:I wonder...

[Ianoo]

You mean like this? It's likely to be stable long before Longhorn is released, too.

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck no... It would suck.

And it goes against the some of the very principles that make unix like systems desireable. Such as a collection of small tools optimized to do their function.

I sure as fucking hell don't want to have to load MySQL before I can access my porno.

6 words: Been Done Before, and Piece of Shit.

Re:I wonder...

[azzy]

It's likely to be released before Longhorn, it's might just be stable before Longhorn is stable. But I doubt it is fully stable before Longhorn is released.

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.

Re:Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

... or you could have made an emergency recovery disk via the utility provided by XP which would repair your installation.

Why on earth were you replacing your SAM file anyway?

Re:Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes! I'm sure millions of people every day experience problems just like that one.

Re:Useful

[schon]

Regardless of the replies you've had, yes this is very useful.

If you're using Win2K and Active Directory, once the drive has less than 20MB free (depending on the system), you can no longer log in - at all - you can't even boot to a command prompt.

For example, Win2K (pre SP-1) had a problem with the log files filling up the harddrive.. old files were supposed to be deleted, but weren't - so the drive fills up.

The 'solution' to this was to install Win2K on a new drive... (the MS bulletin I read noted this was 'disaster recovery' - only in the land of MS would 'your drive is almost full' be a 'disaster'.)

Being unable to log into a Win2K system is more common than a lot of people think.

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:How stable?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's as stable at reading/writing as Windows, then this will be a great hack.

Yes, One great hack. As opposed to some decent software ;)

Re:How stable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it is emulating Windows - what do you expect...

Re:How stable?

[Wumpus]

Have you tried this?

The authors claim the new driver works for read/write, and is stable. I don't dual boot myself, so I haven't tested it, but there seems to be a solution that's not a hack.

Re:How stable?

[ShavenYak]

If it's as stable at reading/writing as Windows, then this will be a great hack.

Man, talk about setting your expectations low....

Re:How stable?

[teslatug]

From that site "Still read-only, but with safe file overwrite support on all Windows versions without changes to the file size and if the file is over 1 kB." It sure doesn't sound all that stable or complete to me.

Re:How stable?

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to the link you specified, but the authors make the following statement about the new ntfs driver, "Still read-only, but with safe file overwrite support on all Windows versions without changes to the file size and if the file is over 1 kB."

Doesn't sound like this is ready for prime time yet as far as writing goes.

This quote actualy came from here:

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/status.html#nt fs driver

Re:How stable?

[Wumpus]

Hmmm... You're right. I missed that part, and I assumed (wrongly) that the existence of TopologiLinux meant that the driver had solid write support.

Re:How stable?

[zerblat]

If you don't care about free as in whatever, there's been stable r/w support for a long time.

Re:How stable?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Use Mozilla. Be a man! Be a MAN!

Because using Mozilla requires a marked proclivity for masochism?

Re:How stable?

[42forty-two42]

If it's as stable at reading/writing as Windows, then this will be a great hack.

Be careful what you wish for...

Re:How stable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haw haw haw!

Wow you dissed windows, you are SO COOL!

Windows NT based systems have extremely stable NTFS support, far more stable than any journaling file system currently in popular use in linux.

Back under your bridge, troll.

Re:How stable?

[ShavenYak]

Wow you dissed windows, you are SO COOL!

Obviously someone thinks so, the post is a 5, Funny and I didn't even use my karma bonus. Of course, /. moderators have been known to hit the crack pipe a time or two!

Windows NT based systems have extremely stable NTFS support, far more stable than any journaling
file system currently in popular use in linux.

More stable than SGI's XFS or IBM's JFS? Perhaps AS stable, but I'd have to see some evidence before believing that either of those fs's fall short of NTFS. I guess those might not fit your criteria of "popular use", though.

Seriously though, I have three XP machines at home and use NTFS on all three of them, so I am aware that it's a decent file system. The joke was just so obvious, though, that I had to jump on it.

To all the "can't go in Knoppix" posters

[BACbKA]

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

Re:To all the "can't go in Knoppix" posters

[ceswiedler]

Of course, there's a chicken-and-egg problem there, but fortunately there's a pretty stable read-only Linux driver for NTFS. So Knoppix would use the free Linux NTFS driver to load the writeable NTFS driver from your NTFS partition...Yes, that would be very cool, because it could happen very automatically.

Re:To all the "can't go in Knoppix" posters

[AchmedHabib]

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.
History has shown that they will do that if it becomes a competition to them. But I can't, with my limited imagination, see this happen in this case.

Not 'free as in speech', but rather

[RLiegh]

'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.

Re:Not 'free as in speech', but rather

[reidbold]

No.. free as in fair use. If someone has the particular driver on their system, then that person should be able to use it on the same computer under a different operating system no?

Writing ext/reiser drivers for windows would fulfil a different niche, (linux user switching to windows perhaps?). This is intended for windows users, who already have ntfs filesystems, switching to linux.

Re:Not 'free as in speech', but rather

[stevey]

better idea to develop OSS device drivers that allow read/write access to ext2/ext3/reiserfs filesystems instead.

You can already access your ext2/ext3 filesystems from Windows, using Explorer2fs.

I'm unaware of other filesystem drivers - but I know that there are different programs for accessing ext2 at least.

I used these happily a year or two ago when I was dualbooting. (I'm certain you can use ext3 as that is backwards compatible if you ignore the journal file, but I've never tested that. Back when I did this kind of thing ext3 wasn't ready for the prime time).

Re:Not 'free as in speech', but rather

[aug24]

Rubbish. Who modded this 'Interesting'?! See, ooh, about 50% of the comments above.

• Any file system using NTFS has the file we need, so we don't need to put it on the Knoppix CD.
• The reason that r/w drivers for NTFS don't exist is cos MS won't finalise the spec AIUI
• There already are r/w drivers for ext2/3/reiser, under both Win and Lin so what are you talking about?!

Justin.

Re:Not 'free as in speech', but rather

[red floyd]

The XP DDK is essentially free (cost of media), and the WinNT and Win2K DDKs are free, but the Windows IFS kit runs US$1000.

Linux File System?

[Angram]

Just wondering...

NTFS is supposed to be a big improvement over FAT32, which is good for Windows. Linux still runs on FAT32 itself, though the Open Source community continuously claims to be more innovative, etc.. Shouldn't Linux be on something "better" than FAT32, or is there really not a lot of room for improvement? There's no reason Linux systems couldn't still read/write FAT32 drives if the native system was changed, so why not?

...Or am I overlooking something (I'm not a Linux user...yet)?

Re:Linux File System?

[BenjyD]

Yes, of course Linux uses FAT32. And that text mode screen you get when you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 is COMMAND.COM from MS-DOS 6.22.

Re:Linux File System?

[descentr]

Linux doesnt usually run on fat32... it's usually ext2 or ext3, depending on your kernel version and distribution. There are dozens of other filesystems out there too that each have their own purpose and advantages. I don't know of anyone silly enough to run Linux on fat32.

Re:Linux File System?

[ceswiedler]

Either you're a troll or yes, you're overlooking somthing. Linux most certainly does not 'run on' FAT32. If anything it usually runs on ext3, which is as good as NTFS in stability, performance, features, etc. Linux does support FAT32, but that's different. If you set up your root partition as FAT32, then you're simply masochistic.

Re:Linux File System?

[sethadam1]

You're overlooking something. Actually, quite a bit....

ext3
Resier/Resier4
JFS
XFS

Re:Linux File System?

[eddy]

You're overlooking the fact that GNU/Linux doesn't normally run on FAT32 (ext2 is the "normal" fs for linux). It was once possible, but I think that support is dead as of linux 2.6

I actually had to check your foes to make sure you weren't an obvious troll.

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux uses Ext2, or more recently Ext3 fs.

Re:Linux File System?

[Wumpus]

Linux still runs on FAT32 itself

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.

...Or am I overlooking something (I'm not a Linux user...yet)?

You got your facts wrong, that's all.

Re:Linux File System?

[susehat]

Linux uses ext2 and ext3 and reiserfs for native file systems. FAT32 is only if you wish to share files between Windows and Linux.

Re:Linux File System?

[TheCrazyFinn]

Linux uses one of: ext2, ext3, XFS, JFS or ReiserFS as it's root filesystem (All of which, apart from ext2 are roughly equivalent to NTFS features-wise). Linux has long supported read/write access on FAT32, but only read access to NTFS partitions. Linux can run on FAT32, but rarely does (UMSDOS installations are bloody rare)

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

The native filesystem for linux isn't fat32. Depending on the distro, it's either ext2 or ext3, with other filesystems as an install-time option (jfs,xfs,reiserfs...).

Re:Linux File System?

[chill]

...Or am I overlooking something

Linux does NOT run on FAT32 as a native file system. It has options of EXT2, EXT3 (EXT2 + journaling), ReiserFS, XFS (from SGI), JFS (from IBM) and probably quite a few more. Yes, you could probably make it run from FAT32, if you tried.

EXT2 is similar to FAT32, whereas the others are similar in concept to NTFS -- journaling, ACLs, etc. Each has its own benefit.

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux don't runs itself in FAT32. Can run on it, but the main filesystems used in Linux are ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS. All a lot better than FAT32. And can be used all at the same time (in different partitions, of course). The improvement is here.

Re:Linux File System?

[Ewan]

Linux doesn't rely on FAT32, never has. What it has is the ability to read and write from a fat32 partition if the users wants to.

Linux has support for dozens of other operating systems' filesystems such as FAT32 and NTFS from Windows, JFS from IBMs OS/2 and AIX, XFS from SGIs Irix, as well as several developed specifically for Linux - such as ext2, ext3, and reiserfs.

Of all the filesystems available for Linux, XFS is probably the most advanced of any mainstream operating system in the world, with far more in the way of features and reliability as NTFS.

Ewan

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it even possible to boot Linux from FAT32? I guess you could load the kernel with Grub, and if init was a single file or E.g. busybox that would sort of work, but sooner or later the inability to create symlinks or properly set file permisions would surely cause problems.

No it doesn't bear much thinking about..

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

While ext3 is a good filesystem, it does not provide transparent compression or proper support for fine grained ACL so I'd still have say NTFS is better in the "features" department.

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux has it's own file systems - there are 3 that are commonly used depending on the system/needs and FAT is not one of them. Linux can read FAT32 drives and a lot of other file systems, however.

Re:Linux File System?

[ShavenYak]

Linux still runs on FAT32 itself, though the Open Source community continuously claims to be more innovative, etc..

Umm, no. Linux can read/write FAT32 filesystems, but typically it is installed on ext2 or ext3 filesystems. Or XFS, or Reiser, or JFS, or.... Basically, anything which supports Unix-like permissions. Does anyone still use the old Minix filesystem?

In theory I guess you could install it on FAT32, but it would be horribly insecure and very kludgey since FAT32 won't support permissions, symlinks, device nodes, sparse files, and probably some other necessities that I'm forgetting right now.

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely this is a troll?

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

are you a complete idiot?

Linux runs on it's OWN types of File system. FAT32 is an abortion that bill gates came up with (FAT16 with a hack)

please learn about what you are talking about before you open your mouth. you sound completely stupid otherwise.

Re:Linux File System?

[Xavier]

Cannot figure if it's a joke or what ...

In case it's not :
Linux can, but generally do not run using FAT32.
It can read and write on such FAT32 file systems, but generally Linux runs using filesystems like Ext2, Ext3, ResierFS, and so on, most of them being journalized.

Just my 0.0002

X.

Re:Linux File System?

[ShavenYak]

Is it even possible to boot Linux from FAT32? I guess you could load the kernel with Grub, and if init was a single file or E.g. busybox that would sort of work, but sooner or later the inability to create symlinks or properly set file permisions would surely cause problems.

Typically nothing is in / but directories. You mount proc on /proc, devfs on /dev, then mount $FILESYSTEM_OF_CHOICE on /lib, /bin, /sbin, /etc, /usr, /var, /home, and so forth. Actually some of those might be safe to have on FAT32. I think it would be doable, but not advisable.

Re:Linux File System?

[Coryoth]

For all those people that complain that if you ask a question about Linux you just get elitist "RTFM loser" replies - there are 18 replies as I reply to this. 1 is a flame, but almost all the rest are quite honest reasonable answers - especially from those who bothered to check foes to see that it wasn't an obvious troll.

It seems you can get quite resonable answers easily enough.

Jedidiah.

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but only using the ugly hack known as UMSDOS.

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

zipslack

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

>EXT2 is similar to FAT32

That's very incorrect. You should know that if you've ever touched a linux system (file permissions for starters). The only way they are similar is that they can be used to store data in a retrevable way from disk storage.

ext3 is just ext2 with journaling.
FAT32 is a bad hack/extention to FAT16.

>the others are similar in concept to NTFS -- journaling, ACLs, etc

You can have ext2 with ACLs, extended attributes etc... (and even journaling but then it's called ext3..)

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

> While ext3 is a good filesystem, it does not
> provide transparent compression

There is add on patches for onfly compression, plus you can also have a completely compressed filesystem.

> or proper support for fine grained ACL so I'd
> still have say NTFS is better in the "features"
> department.

It does have support for fine grained ACLs, they have been available as a patch for quite a while and if you check the 2.6.x kernel you'll notice it's now included in the vanilla source.

There is also an addon (which I think is commercial, free for home users/students/individual) which enables on the fly compress + automatic encryption for ext3.

Re:Linux File System?

[Goalie_Ca]

Linux supports all kinda of file systems, many of them have been way better, for quite a while, than what you'll see in longhorn.

Re:Linux File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

And I don't know anyone silly enough to use this.

Re:Linux File System?

[42forty-two42]

From what I understand, umsdos (support for unix semantics on dos filesystems) just hasn't been rewritten for the new kernel APIs yet, but will be in the future.

Re:Linux File System?

[ashridah]

taken from the Configure.help from linux 2.4.23:

CONFIG_UMSDOS_FS
Say Y here if you want to run Linux from within an existing DOS partition of your hard drive. The advantage of this is that you can get away without repartitioning your hard drive (which often implies backing everything up and restoring afterwards) and hence you're able to quickly try out Linux or show it to your friends; the disadvantage is that Linux becomes susceptible to DOS viruses and that UMSDOS is somewhat slower than ext2fs. Another use of UMSDOS is to write files with long unix filenames to MSDOS floppies; it also allows Unix-style soft-links and owner/permissions of files on MSDOS floppies. You will need a program called umssync in order to make use of UMSDOS; read
<file:Documentation/filesystems/umsdos.txt>.


From memory, there's still a distro around called 'PHAT linux' or something like that that will install to a fat32 partition and use loadlin+umsdos to work inside the filesystem.
Don't know if it's still active, could well be, not so useful now that people use ntfs even on 'home' systems.

ashridah

Re:Linux File System?

[bsd troll]

So why do they continue using FAT32 if so many superior "file systems" are available?

Re:Linux File System?

[Proctal Relapse]

this is true, but on principle, i never listen to asians.

Re:Linux File System?

[descentr]

And since I'm not Asian, you have nothing to worry about. Idiot.

Knoppix won't have ntfs.sys ever

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Knoppix won't provide ntfs.sys because that is copyrighted by Microsoft. Now knoppix may allow loading the driver if you have nt/2000/xp on a hard-drive, but won't you need to load the linux ntfs driver first, if it's on an ntfs drive?

This may be a helpful idea for the short-term, but you're better off with more free-open-source-driver.

Re:Knoppix won't have ntfs.sys ever

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding, right?

Most of the time you would have to already have NT/2k/XP installed if you have a NTFS partition. So, like duh, you already installed Windows and have all the stuff that comes along with it.

The only special case I can see is if you are trying to access a foreign drive (USB/Firewire drive, etc.).

Re:Knoppix won't have ntfs.sys ever

[Anonymous Coward]

The only special case I can see is if you are trying to access a foreign drive (USB/Firewire drive, etc.).
Or simply a secondary drive. Regardless of Knoppix, you see I don't have NT so a sys loader doesn't help me. I do service work for people, and if they have NT and if I used ntfs.sys I would rely on their copy if it is accessible on their disk. I don't know if there are any legal issues with that. So far, I haven't had much need to read an NTFS disk, but as time passes the need will increase (a good percentage of people still use FAT32 right now). I'd much rather have an open source driver do the work and hopefully it will be done by that time.

Re:Knoppix won't have ntfs.sys ever

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, you do service work yet don't own a copy of Windows?

Um... I suggest you either not service Windows people or find a new profession because you're too lame to get a copy of Windows yet insist on servicing it. I wouldn't hire you, that's for sure.

The Microsoft "operating systems" subscription is only $500-$700 (depending on if you qualify for upgrade; pretty easy). That's a small price to pay for us consultants and service people. And you get all the OS's. Like duh...

Re:Knoppix won't have ntfs.sys ever

[lucas teh geek]

nice to see you bothered the read the many replies before you who have already stated how this could be done

Monster Monster

[BenBenBen]

Maybe Debian could give it a try. I hear NTFS is the World's Most Secure and Reliable Filesystem.

Re:Monster Monster

[BenBenBen]

So when MS f$cks up it's funny, but when it's a distro you mock it's trolling?

And I thought MCSEs had no sense of humour.

Re:Monster Monster

[webxd]

No kidding. I read this as just being sarcastic towards Microsoft and it was funny to me. Trolling? I don't think so.

Off topic, but did you guys know that slashdotters

[bitsformoney]

program in VB? :) teehee

look at the windows boot loader

[gimpboy]

And if it isn't in a certain folder in the Windows base directory, Windows can't find it anyway. So it's just a matter of finding the base directory, and grabbing it from there.

so knoppix can probably find out where windows is installed by examining the bootloader for windows. i believe it points to the windows installation directory (which device, directory, etc.).

You need to get ntfs.sys legally somehow

[dido]

Otherwise, you'll get sued by Microsoft for copyright infringement. I doubt we'll ever legally see it work on Knoppix or similar distros for that reason. How would you be able to get a copy of ntfs.sys from within, say, a loaded and running Knoppix without first mounting the NTFS partition in the first place? Well, probably the in-kernel read-only driver could get ntfs.sys from some other NTFS partition, copy that file into a ramdisk, then remount using ntfs.sys. Still sounds like a monstrously klugy solution, and one that will make life difficult for the users of a CD distribution like Knoppix.

It's not like ntfs.sys is readily distributable free of charge like the Win32 codec DLL's are, right? Or is it?

The best solution would really to get write support on NTFS working. That would get rid of this kluge to avoid copyright infringement.

Re:You need to get ntfs.sys legally somehow

[Anonymous Coward]

The best solution would really to get write support on NTFS working. That would get rid of this kluge to avoid copyright infringement.

Brilliant!!!

Re:You need to get ntfs.sys legally somehow

[Anonymous Coward]

By rebooting into Windows NT and copying the file from %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers to a floppy disk.

Easy as that.

Re:You need to get ntfs.sys legally somehow

[Anonymous Coward]

If you won Windows you already have the right to mount your NTFS drive using the NTFS system, in any manner you wish. There is no reason you cannot load the DLL into Knoppix. It's no different than using Wine to run windows apps on linux.

Re:You need to get ntfs.sys legally somehow

[Anonymous Coward]

All right dumbass... Listen up

Most of the time you will already have Windows installed if you have a NTFS partition, no? So the ntfs.sys driver is already on your system. Duh.

Morons, your train is leaving.

Re:You need to get ntfs.sys legally somehow

[short]

The legal way of gettings ntfs.sys by the read-only LinuxNTFS driver into ramdisk is already being incorporated into Knoppix based distribution Kinneret.

Re:You need to get ntfs.sys legally somehow

[spectecjr]

It's not like ntfs.sys is readily distributable free of charge like the Win32 codec DLL's are, right? Or is it?

Just FYI; the codec DLLs aren't distributable free of charge either.

Is this a precursor to Windows EFS compatibility?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing how the latest ntfs driver in Windows is hacked and integral to Windows EFS functionality, does this mean you could see an open source (almost) implementation of Windows EFS (like Samba is to CIFS) for folks to seamlessly encrypt to remote Webdav folders using PKI certs? That would be yummy.

See this in Knoppix real soon...

[hackus]

while Microsoft says See you in court real soon.

That driver is a closed binary and is subject to the DMCA act as well as Federal and State copyright laws.

You put that binary on a CD guy and your asking for it, and besides, it isn't in keeping with GNU distro's recognition of existing copyright law.

GNU license fully recognizes copyright and IP laws in most countries, no matter how draconian they are. (i.e. specifically the US)

-Hack

Re:See this in Knoppix real soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

The user already has the right to use the DLL when he/she purchases the software. And reverse engineering is legal.

Copyrights have nothing to do with it, w-h-a-t-s-o-e-v-e-r. Neither does the DCMA, as you are not cracking the encryption of the file system. DLLs are not covered under the DMCA.

Re:See this in Knoppix real soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is suggesting putting the binary on a CD. It is already on the users computer - so there is no need.

Re:See this in Knoppix real soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the argument could be made that the user surrenders his rights when he licenses (not "purchases") the software.

Re:See this in Knoppix real soon...

[JediTrainer]

Nobody is suggesting putting the binary on a CD. It is already on the users computer - so there is no need.

Great! So we'll read the NTFS drive first, locate the NTFS driver on it, then... oh wait.

Re:See this in Knoppix real soon...

[Dr. Evil]

NTFS read-only support under Linux has been around for a LONG time.

Apologies

[Angram]

Ah, sorry then - I plead ignorance.

Go ahead and mod my original post down.

Another legal way to deal with the driver

[unfortunateson]

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.

Re:Another legal way to deal with the driver

[cyb97]

Getting a friend to format your drive would be one way to get a NTFS-partition w/o actually touching windows yourself. I've numerous times connected friends harddrives up to my computer do dump stuff on them. Dumping it in a fs they can recognize would certainly be a big +. So I guess this means no more FAT for Linux users ;-)

Re:Another legal way to deal with the driver

[Lumpy]

why?

simply use the linux ntfs read-only driver, copy the file from the ntfs partitioninto a ramdrive, unmount and then remount using the ntfs driver.

no need to have it anywhere cince it is alreay on the ntfs disk already.

Re:Another legal way to deal with the driver

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no friends you insensitive clod!

Call me crazy but...

[buck09]

I think it would be a good idea to get Linux to natively support NTFS partitions. That way, users of Windows would be able to boot either OS, and easily share data between the two. The way I see it, you could have a \Linux folder, containing everything execpt the /swap filesystem.

This would be very handy to me, since I use XP for Video / Photo Editing, Gaming, and Linux for everything else.

Am I crazy? Is this crazy talk? Why not give users the option to use Ext3, RiserFS, NTFS, etc all on the same page?

Re:Call me crazy but...

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been trying to come up with a stable NTFS mounter for years. Personally, I'm guessing that MS has put some code in their NTFS driver specifically designed to make it difficult to reverse engineer. There is a new open source project that started in the last year or so, and they seem to be making pretty fast progress. Forget the name - check sourceforge...

Re:Call me crazy but...

[Avian visitor]

This would be very handy to me, since I use XP for Video

Transcode,
Cinelerra, ...

Photo Editing,

Gimp, ...

Gaming

Nethack :)

Try again... What do you need windows for?

Re:Call me crazy but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it would be a good idea to have full NTFS support in linux, the problem is that there's no documentation available!

Re:Call me crazy but...

[ncc74656]

This would be very handy to me, since I use XP for Video

Transcode,
Cinelerra, ...

Try again... What do you need windows for?

Do you know of anything equivalent in quality and/or speed to TMPGEnc? As an alternative, do you know how to get TMPGEnc working under Wine? The last time I tried (maybe a year or so ago), I didn't get very far with it.

(While we're at it, something comparable to Avisynth would be nice. Access to Avisynth plugins would also be a Good Thing...though given that it's open-source, maybe the more interesting plugins have already been implemented in some other Linux-native software already.)

Re:Call me crazy but...

[Anonymous Coward]

containing everything execpt the /swap filesystem

I use the same swap file for both windows and linux. Like this:

mount /dev/hda5 /var/nt
mkswap /var/nt/pagefile.sys
swapon /var/nt/pagefile.sys

Put that in your rc.S and you are good to go.

Re:Call me crazy but...

[Avian visitor]

I don't know about TMPGEnc, but I've used Transcode to make some VCD and SVCDs. I think the quality is as good as any other MPEG1 encoder.

Re:Call me crazy but...

[ncc74656]

I don't know about TMPGEnc, but I've used Transcode to make some VCD and SVCDs. I think the quality is as good as any other MPEG1 encoder.

MPEG-1 doesn't cut it when you're making SVCDs and DVDs...you need MPEG-2 for that.

Re:Call me crazy but...

[Avian visitor]

Transcode supports a lot of codecs (MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 included). I've mentioned MPEG-1 because tmpgenc.net says that TMPGEnc is a MPEG-1 encoder.

Re:Call me crazy but...

[ncc74656]

Transcode supports a lot of codecs (MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 included).

It does? Guess it's time to take another look at it. (BTW, TMPGEnc supports MPEG-2...don't know why their site only mentions MPEG-1.)

Re:Call me crazy but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know of anything equivalent in quality and/or speed to TMPGEnc? As an alternative, do you know how to get TMPGEnc working under Wine? The last time I tried (maybe a year or so ago), I didn't get very far with it.

You could use MEncoder to encode the video (no GUI, but very high quality and extremely fast), or transcode as mentioned before, or you can even use FFMPEG directly (it has very good documentation, and it is the codec library that most other GNU/Linux video tools use). You could also try Kino (old GNOME 1 GUI, but very user-friendly). MJPEG tools provides some low-level encoding utilities for MPEG2, but I don't know about quality or speed as I haven't tried them. Once you have your MPEG2, you might try DVDAuthor to create a DVD structure (including menus if you need them).

Re:Call me crazy but...

[IamTheRealMike]

Actually NTFS has been fully reverse engineered for some years now. The problem is simply one of manpower - all the people working on the linux-ntfs project are volunteers, and they have the same problem we have in Wine: there are simply not that many people who can do it.

Despite the high level of interest in the projects success very few people are willing/able to setup zillions of test partitions and then take a low-level hex editor to them when it goes wrong.

This is an interesting hack for sure, but long term there's no reason why we can't have native write support. We know how, it's just a case of doing it.

The simple fact of the matter is...

[Anonymous Coward]

dual-booters are pussies (as are people who use Live CDs other than for rescue or trying it out). If you're going to use Linux, boot it up, and leave it running. Your Linux machine doesn't need NTFS partitions on it. Need to access files in Windows? Use Samba.

This is a good thing for rescuing NTFS partitions, but other than that, being able to read/write NTFS is of very little value.

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[pyr0]

So I'm a pussy huh? What about those who *need* to use MS Office because they exchange documents with others who use MS Office, and can't afford to buy a whole separate box to run windows on? And no, OpenOffice doesn't do a good enough conversion yet. Why was this even modded insightful? Who are you to tell anyone what they do or don't need on their machine?

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[pyros]

dual-booters are pussies

That should be sending me a flag that this is just a troll or flamebait, but I'm biting anyway. I don't have the money to buy an extra machine so I can run Linux and my wife can run Windows. And I'm not such a zealot as to make her use Linux for tasks that she finds easier in Windows. There is no Photoshop for Linux, and the only legal ways to run Photoshop in Linux end up meaning I have to have a copy of Windows. (VMWare + Windows, Bochs + Windows, Wine + Windows DLLs). So if I'm already paying for Windows, then I may as well dualboot it and avoid the performance hit of VMWare/Bochs/Wine.

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck yourself, jerk. How does the inside of your own colon actually look?

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no Photoshop for Linux.

There's Gimp and it's pretty good (yes, I use Photoshop anyway).

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but Gimp is NOT Photoshop. For a geek, you're pretty dumb.

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Zzootnik]

Not to say you're a pussy, but there IS an alternative...
Crossover Office. Runs the ACTUAL office suite and much more under linux.
Give that a shot...wuss! ;-)

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'm a pussy for wanting to dual boot so I can play Windows games?

At least the time I saved dual booting enabled me to actually GET pussy rather than just using it as an insult on Slashdot.

Later, virgin boy

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll give you a shot. IN THE ASS

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[darien]

Surely in that case it ought to be called Ginp?

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[bh445]

Not to invalidate what you are saying, but there is another way to run Photoshop under Linux. Crossover Office allows some Windows programs to be run in Linux and it works quite well. It supports Photoshop, M$ Office XP and several other useful Windows programs. I assume it is faster than a Bochs setup also.

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very dirty !!

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Hypocritical Guy]

If you're booting up Windows just to run MS Office, yes, you are a pussy.

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Hypocritical Guy]

For the price of Photoshop, you could buy another machine to run Windows. (But then you'd be a pussy for having a Windows machine around.)

Oh yeah, you can't afford to buy Photoshop, so you pirated it, along with your copy of Windows. Nice.

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Hypocritical Guy]

So I'm a pussy for wanting to dual boot so I can play Windows games?

Yep. Being a gamer automatically makes you a pussy.

At least the time I saved dual booting enabled me to actually GET pussy rather than just using it as an insult on Slashdot.

If that's the way you swing, good for you. But I don't see how dual booting saves you any time, it seems more the opposite. I don't have to reboot, that saves me time, leaving me enough time to get some ass.

Later, virgin boy

I fuck guys like you in the ass.

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Anonymous Coward]

I fuck guys like you in the ass.

So you're a fag?

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[tibman]

Linux as a server, yes.

Linux as a desktop, no.. dual booting is useful. I keep all my binaries & important media in linux. The only thing windows really does well is games. Having the ability to nuke the windows partition every few months and lose nothing feels good.

Yea, using samba is fine, but it seems windows only acts up when you're at a lanparty or something. All you wanna do is play games.. so you nuke it, recopy over a backed up fresh install.. you're playing again in minutes.

But, i do agree with you to a point. Linux is best after it's been up for 200+ days or so. Gives the feeling of true reliability.

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone needs to mod this funny :-)

Re:The simple fact of the matter is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone needs to mod this funny too :-)

exect that ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux already support read/write mounting NTFS partitions. Using their driver is unnecessary.

Re:exect that ...

[cabodine]

You are correct linux does have support to READ a NTFS volume but that is where it ends. Write support has been listed as experimental. Also there is more to NTFS then just reading a file or writting it. There is the ACL, if the native linux drivert doesn't support changes to this then the driver would very much be needed in recovery from a messed up ACL. But you could do that from another NT machine. From my experience it is best to only access the drive from the OS it was meant to be access from.

The driver in this caase is needed to write to the drive in a safe manner. I have read many of the comments of the people that have used it and I ask my self why do they need to use it? Many others have stated it on here , that it is just easier to share out the drive and get to it from samba.

Re:exect that ...

[iamplupp]

the driver in 2.6 also has partial (safe) write support. if i remeber correctly you can overwrite existing files as long as the neew one is the same size. (but thats pretty much everuthing)

Already in the works, chum.

[sethadam1]

Good ol Seth Nickell and Storage. WinFS-ish to be sure.

Re:Already in the works, chum.

[hookedup]

Nice, thanks.

Why do it the hard way?

[Lehk228]

It doesn't have to be that complicated, Instruct the USER to copy ntfs.sys onto a floppy disk or onto the thumb drive that knoppix can use for user data storage, or have it grab ntfs.sys off the windowsXP install CD that would be inserted in the second Optical drive

Re:Why do it the hard way?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the reason Linux has such a shit user experience ;P

Re:Why do it the hard way?

[gregfortune]

Yep, Knoppix is pretty tough to use...

Re:Why do it the hard way?

[adrianbaugh]

Surely (from the user's point of view) having to copy .sys files onto floppies etc. is more complicated than just having the knoppix CD do everything automatically? It might be a bit tougher for the knoppix developers but that's the kind of thing they enjoy.
Besides which, my current box doesn'e even have a floppy drive anymore. Not that it has NT either, but...

Hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

A very neat hack uses the real ntfs.sys driver...

Sorry, but I don't actually like anyone hacking my computer even if it is myself. Is there any other way to get the NTFS working without having to hack my computer? Or is there some way I could safely hack my computer without creating any exploits, etc.?

Re:Hack?

[polyp2000]

I am amazed that anyone reading articles on slashdot doesnt know the correct meaning of the word hack.

I suggest that you read here

http://www.jargon.8hz.com/jargon_23.html#SEC30

shame on you ... call yourself a geek ?

nick ...

Re:Hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoooosh !!

MOD PARENT UP

[SlipJig]

I have to say I'm impressed with this NTFS hack, and it would be useful for me, but developing OSS ext2/ext3/reiserfs drivers for Windows would be equally useful. I use Explore2Fs and it's OK, but I'd rather have the support in Windows itself. This idea has never occurred to me, and it probably hasn't occurred to many others as well.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[JKR]

Partly that's because writing filesystems ain't like dusting crops, boy; even if you have the specs. For MS that means buying the IFS (installable filesystem) driver kit, for $1000, and I believe it's only available under NDA.

I would like to see ext3 for XP, and UFS too. Windows JFFS2 drivers for removable smartmedia would be nice too, but these things are a bitch to port. Ideally, you'll have a full debug (checked) build of XP and a second XP machine to run a kernel debugger on. One mistake in IFS code and it's off to bluescreen/reboot city.

Jon.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Firehawke]

Admittedly, it WOULD be nice to see ext3/reiser read/write support for XP. I just don't see it happening any time soon, really. :/ Well, not unless the guy who did the ext2 driver for NT/2K/XP decides to add ext3 support.

APT source?

[osu-neko]

I see they have debs, is this on any archive we can stuff in our apt sources.list yet (official or otherwise)?

Not illegal

[spectrokid]

If a PC has a NTFS partition on it, it means it also has Windows installed on it, otherwise what is the point... The Knoppix CD has to find a way to load the driver already present using a read-only mount. For full dual-boot systems, the exact location could be saved so Linux can skip the first step, compare to Lilo "compiling" the location of the kernel.

Re:Not illegal

[BoysDontCry]

Not necessarily. Maybe it's a second hard drive used for storage that happens to have an NTFS partition, and there's no Windows installation on it at all.

GPL loophole

[deanpole]

A loophole in the GPL is becomming increasingly clear, making the LGPL and GPL equivalent. Use two separate groups of developers. The first builds proprietary code with an incompatible ABI. The second modifies the GPL code to mate with the proprietary one.

usual M$ boasts are empty.

[twitter]

Ownership, permissions, sharing, all that stuff Microsoft boasts to have much better than Linux (better gradation of permissions in operations)

Such boasts are obviously proved empty by full read write access from a boot disk. If you want to perpetuate Microsoft's insecure, performance lame and unportable database tables of files and users for permisions, you will have to buy into Microsoft's Next Generation rootkit, aka Longhorn, with a cripled bios motherboard and explosives on the hard disk. If you think this will provide anything but an inconvenience to the user and administrators, you have no memory of Microsoft's previous promisses of the same or are insane. Email and internet born exploits will continue to provide interested third parties any information placed on Microsoft run computers. Untill locked out by bios, Knoppix will continue to give unfettered access to Microsoft and other systems for reasonable repair and back up of completely unreasonable junk that's incapable of the same.

Re:usual M$ boasts are empty.

[JKR]

Grow up. NTFS is technically a fairly decent filesytem, and the ACL system works well. Would you consider Linux insecure simply because I can get full read/write access with a boot floppy? If I have physical access to the box, it's owned.

Email and internet born exploits will continue to provide interested third parties any information placed on Microsoft run computers.

Yeah, those run by clueless idiots. Run along, troll.

Jon.

Re:usual M$ boasts are empty.

[danheskett]

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?

Umm ok, so

[Anonymous Coward]

using ntfs.sys denies your freedom of speech now?

When are you guys goin to complain that using MS products denies your righ to bare arms?

Re:Off topic, but did you guys know that slashdott

[Anonymous Coward]

We believe in extreme programming, not extreme salaries. Hey, we don't do this for the money anyway, right?

Any question as to the amount of hallucinagens they use was answered right there.

One reason

[Anonymous Coward]

If your windows directory was clobbered (e.g. by a virus) or corrupt (e.g. sector failre), you won't have access to this DLL.

Besides, Knoppix *already* includes NTFS support. It works just fine (A non-techie friend's computer became non-bootable. I used Knoppix to back up what he needed on system to CD, then replaced a few critical DLLs to get things to work again).

Re:One reason

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you, high? You didn't do that, mostly because its impossible. Linux's NTFS implementation is so weak that is can't support writes (except for 2.6's "you can write as long as you don't change anything" joke of an improvement).

Pointless soon

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares, we'll all be using Windows again soon once SCO wins in court.

You're overlooking something

[ColourlessGreenIdeas]

Linux doesn't use FAT32. OK; Linux CAN use FAT32, or it can use ext2fs (usual on 2.2, very fast, no journaling), ext3fs (compatible with ext2fs, journaling, a tad slower, the default for RedHat), reiserfs (Very fast, journaling, default on lots of distros and probably the most popular), or XFS (SGI's file system) or JFS (IBM's file system). All the improvements you're looking for are there now.

YHBT

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL -- one of the best /. trolls, ever. Bravo, sir, bravo -- 16 heartfelt replies.

Great. What about ReiserFS, though?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked I couldn't find anything similar for ReiserFS... nothing free, anyway.

the tricky part

[twitter]

The tricky part is the usual M$ interoperability problem, Microsoft will break it. As soon as you figure out how to use it, M$ can pull a "system update" that changes everything right under you. They can even make it so that you harm your system or destroy information if you try to use it. They have done this for other sytems as far back as DRDOS. It would not be hard for them to put in a flag that they know about, but you don't. It's Microsoft, they suck, use it at your own risk.

Re:the tricky part

[aminorex]

Checksum the .sys before installing. Copy it
to a safe place. Always use the safe one
thereafter.

Re:the tricky part

[Nucleon500]

Better than that, any scripts to automatically extract ntfs.sys and mount with it should have a list of known-good checksums. Then it would be impossible for MS to cause data corruption with an update overwriting that file - the checksum would change and the script wouldn't load it.

It ain't free if it requires ms-windows

[Anonymous Bullard]

I don't do windows, but wouldn't it be preferable to put the resources towards native solutions? Also, wasn't the HPFS (OS/2) file system support part of the native NTFS project? What's become of that effort?

If the "Captive" (?) NTFS project needs the original MS driver it might also be illegal, and plain useless when there's no ms-windows around but only data to be rescued.

Anyways, if this project scratches someone's itches then who cares - go for it. At least one can always try pulling stuff like this under the open source skies. Try retrofitting ms-windows with non-ms-sanctioned FS support... now there's a challenge!

Re:It ain't free if it requires ms-windows

[fishbowl]

"I don't do windows, but wouldn't it be preferable to put the resources towards native solutions?"

It might be that the native solution is a lost cause, comparatively.

It was far simpler to interface to the windows library than to reverse engineer it. So you can have this today, but it wouldn't even have been a fraction of the work needed to take the native driver any further. Do you realize how that development is done? Hex editor on the partition, make an operation, hex edit, log and analyze the result...

As to other platforms, well, we are talking about a Windows filesystem here... and Alpha is pretty much dead... what other platforms were you going to use a windows fs on, and how hard would it be to talk you out of it?

As for HPFS, where the hell is IBM on that? Thought they were supposed to be our friends this month.

I would also like to see pluggable filesystems for windows. Maybe if a bunch of smart people play with ntfs.sys, there will be an "a-ha" moment, and then we get it by accident :-)

Re:It ain't free if it requires ms-windows

[irgu]

• Do you realize how that development is done? Hex editor on the partition, make an operation, hex edit, log and analyze the result...

No. That's over, every important thing is known and documented on the linux-ntfs.sf.net site. The lack of developers' free time is the problem.

Re:It ain't free if it requires ms-windows

[fishbowl]

>The lack of developers' free time is the problem.

If you say so. They don't even have time to update the FAQ, so I'm not holding my breath for a driver.

I'm hoping for a generation of kids that has no problem just looking at object code and understanding it, instead of throwing a fit about "open source this, free that". Yes I realize the complexity of object code today, but, with everyone saying it can't be done, there's bound to be someone who can come along and just do it... I'd really love to see the revolution that ensues after the lack of "source code" ceases to be a problem anymore.

Re:It ain't free if it requires ms-windows

[flend]

I don't do windows, but wouldn't it be preferable to put the resources towards native solutions?

What resources? This is one guy's pet project by the looks of things. If you want some big Linux company to dedicate $100,000s to developing native NTFS dream on...

Re:I'm not sure / Score one for SCO

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

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.

While some past issues in the lawsuit may be spurious at best, this one is da bomb. Without a doubt Sco can show that stealing things from other systems is there own special trade secret. Therefore, stealing the NTFS driver is directly stealing from Scos own IP.
"Your honor, you look confused"

Kernel read access

[phorm]

Read access from the NTFS partitions seems to be simpler than write access, and it's part of the kernel. I'm not sure if there are extended read functions in ntfs.sys, but you do need it to get the write functionality.

Not needed for basic reading

[phorm]

There are already kernel modules that allow you to read NTFS partitions, though I'm not sure if it's full-functioned (large filenames, etc). If you were just looking to copy off your important data, basic read access might be all one needs in most cases.

Re:Not needed for basic reading

[stm2]

Yes, Knoppix NTFS support works with large filenames (I think it even works with compressed filesystems) but Knoppix NTFS support is good enought to be use it as a Resq CD for Windows.
Read it here: Computer First Aid Using Knoppix and this is a small post I made about it (in Spanish): Rescatando datos de Windows usando Knoppix Linux

try again, silly.

[twitter]

Would you consider Linux insecure simply because I can get full read/write access with a boot floppy? If I have physical access to the box, it's owned.

Of course, and that's the point of a maintenance boot disk and the whole thread is a troll. A boot disk made so you can fix a system, regardless of the "permisions" on it. Having full read write access to NTFS makes that boot disk that much more useful because you can get at stupid XP boxes and write changes there. While this is usually futile, because of Microsoft's idiotic regisrty system, it's nice to have it. Implementing Microsoft's dumb permissions system would make repair impossible, because M$ forbids anyone but themselves from modifying and copying parts of their system.

>Email and internet born exploits will continue to provide interested third parties any information placed on Microsoft run computers.

Yeah, those run by clueless idiots.

Like the people who make Windows?. It's crap, Jon.

Re:try again, silly.

[Anonymous Coward]

How does it feel to be a complete idiot? Thanks, goodbye.

Re:try again, silly.

[JKR]

Oh FFS. No admin with a clue exposes more than the absolute minimum number of ports to an untrusted network. MY firewalls stopped Slammer et al in their tracks. If you are clueless enough to have a box on the internet without a real firewall in between deserve all you get, and it doesn't matter WHAT operating system(s) you run.

I manage a heterogenous network and ALL the operating systems have security flaws, but by and large our network design mitigates them. We run XP and develop on XP, running on Windows, Linux and Solaris, and no-one is helping themselves to any information on those machines.

For the majority of development work, Linux is junk compared to XP; We use Java almost exclusively, and the performance of, say, Eclipse on Linux is 30-50% down on XP.

Jon.

Re:try again, silly.

[Anonymous Coward]

OMFG!!!! OMG teh TWIT is ON TEH spoke AGAINN!!!! TWIT hes says dat teh m$ FILE sYstem is TEH BAD!!! is TEH dumb!!!1!!!

Grow the fuck up, you pathetic worthless troll. Jeesus fucking christ, you're so extreme even your "pals" here in extremist land don't like you.

Now, everything else aside, just what exactly is it that you consider "dumb" about NTFS? It's far superior to anything you can get with your crappy little Lunix distro, and that's something that people who write your crappy little toy OS have said, not me. So I'm sure everyone would love to hear some technical backing as to why NTFS is "dumb". Go ahead, knock yourself out.

Like the people who make Windows?. It's crap, Jon.

Twit, someone just 0wned Debian (Debian!) using an exploit in the fucking kernel. The kernel. I'd say that's worse than a stupid email worm that generates lots of traffic. You're just fucking lucky you don't have 60 million machines out there waiting to be attacked, otherwise that would have turned into a mess of epic proportions. So while we're talking about how crappy "teh windoze" is, also define "crap" for us as well, if you can. thx!

bah. i hate these. non-x86 users suffer.

[Splork]

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.

Not until after boot but

[phorm]

You could probably handle this with a simple bash script:

#!/bin/sh

modprobe ntfs
mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows
find /mnt/windows -iname ntfs.sys -exec ntfsload {} \;

umount /mnt/windows
rmmod ntfs
mount -t winntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

The ntfsload command and winntfs FS being, of course, fudged (because the site is dead), but something similar should work just fine?

You better download this today.

[Anonymous Coward]

How susceptible is the author to intimidation? This question does not depend on the author's character; only the size of his wallet and jurisdiction.

...It is expected you already have valid Microsoft Windows license...

And that license allows you to pull out pieces of Microsoft's OS (which you paid for) and run them under another OS.

It's on the user to make this determination after reading and understanding the MS EULA in the (rather fluid) legal context in which it exists.

Re:You better download this today.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people believe otherwise, but I believe that what you do in private is nobody else's business.

That means, no license can constrain you in this way. Once you're not in private anymore, the rules change, of course.

It doesn't matter if the windows EULA allows or disallows. Because it's not relevant. What I do in the privacy of my own home is nobody's business but mine. Certainly not Microsoft's.

Re:You better download this today.

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree with you!

Microsoft may not, though. So, a person provides a tool to grant safe access to a resource--which you own--remember, that's your data on that drive. And Microsoft has spent quite a bit of money deliberately breaking existing compatabilities. Clearly this state--incompatability--has value to them.

It's not inconceivable that Microsoft might expend some effort to see that such a tool is not available for the public to use.

It's kinda like the whole "fair use" issue. Fair use says functionally what you posted--what you do in your house is your business. And interested parties cannot use legal means to directly curtail your rights to fair use.

What they can do, however, is make it technically difficult for you to exercise these rights.

So, sure, you can read your NTFS partition in your own house. And you can do it from another OS.

Too bad we bought off/intimidated/harassed/took out and shot the only author of the tool that allows you to do this. 'Course someone else might create such a tool, and they're free to do so. Care to try?

OT: Your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you've never heard of a "back burn"?

MOD PARENT DOWN -1 FLAMEBAIT

[Anonymous Coward]

There really are device drivers for windows which allow you to mount and otherwise access ext2/ext3 and reiserfs filesystems under windows as if they were native, you say?

Post the urls to said device drivers, please; we'd be very interested in seeing them.

Oh, you can't, because they do not exist and the existence of explore2fs confused you? thought so.

Off to -1 flamebait with your sorry ass.

Look at how Cygwin handles mapping

[roboros]

The Cygwin *nix-emulation layer for Windows does a pretty decent job of mapping NT file permissions for *nix programs run under it. Of course, it would probably be pretty difficult to read out the users and groups from the SAM database when Windows is not running, but for many it would probably be quite acceptable to run a program under Windows once which exports a few files with the necessary information (mapping from security identifiers to user/group names etc). This information should rarely change, so that shouldn't be a big problem.

STOP!

[Angram]

Please stop responding.

It was not a joke or troll, I'm just not a Linux user (yet).

I aplogized and requested my original post be modded down in response to the first person who corrected my oversight - there is no need for further conversation on the subject.

Thank you.

Re:STOP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Spaz.

Re:STOP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux doesn't run on FAT32! Yeesh, how silly!

Re:STOP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so you're just an idiot. I had more respect for you when I thought you were a troll.

Personally

[floydman]

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.

Re:bah. i hate these. non-x86 users suffer.

[Ziviyr]

I'd think it would make reverse engineering easier not having to reboot all the time to test how it reacts to various situations.

Heck, running the real NTFS on a loopback would prolly be a wet dream to the people working on the free NTFS implementation.

What tools?

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Do you mean the great "recovery" CD I got with my laptop? It will happily erase my partition number one and install an obsolete unpatched version of Windows XP Professional on it. Without any apps or any of my data.

I vastly prefer KNOPPIX to save my data whenever Microsoft Windows is unable to boot up....

Oh nice

[Melissa Bra]

Copy more features from Windows. Nice tactic.

Re:Oh nice

[Anonymous Coward]

It is becoming more and more apparent that by the time Linux is competing head-to-head with Windows on the desktop, Linux will be indistinguishable from Windows.

It's because MS refuses to finalise the NTFS spec.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeez, don't any of the slashbots know anything?

a bit of topic

[jOin3r]

Actualy you can run Quake III without need to cp PAK0.PK3 to ext3 partition. You can have the file on the ntfs partition and run Quake3 with +set fs_basepath /path/to/ntfs/partition. It doesn't result in an error. (btw. /local/games/quake3/baseq3/ isn't as well writable by user only ~/.q3a directory is.
(sorry by the off topic i'm using slashdot for 1time =))

Not really

[metalhed77]

The NTFS file system has stayed stable since Win2k. Additionally, Longhorn probably will have a new FS (or maybe a DBMS on top of NTFS but I can't remember, it's all speculation anyway). A filesystem is harder to break compatibility with than other things. Let's not forget that XP and 2k can still install onto FAT32 partitions. I assure you that at the very least MS will include backwards compatibility for these FS's in their next OS. I can possibly see it not existing for the root partition, but it will remain.

Do not forget, breaking compatibility angers all of their customers. It's not just a transparent patch.

Re:Not really

[Firehawke]

They've confirmed it's just an additional layer on top of the existing NTFS in their recent information packages for developers who are getting the early start on Longhorn app development.

Re:Not really

[Sneftel]

They don't have to change the filesystem, just the driver. Have it do the same stuff, but differently... make use of API calls that are known to be missing from Wine...have it make other calls with improper semantics, and depend on the undefined (but known) results...Or just have it crash Wine, which doesn't exactly require a computing genius.

Re:Not really

[CAIMLAS]

The NTFS file system has stayed stable since Win2k.

So? NTFS stability has nothing at all to do with MS adding some arbitrary code that will not directly effect the operation in windows, but if not combined with some other critical system component (say, a running process, etc.) it will 'mysteriously' start corrupting any data it writes, or something equally devious.

Additionally, Longhorn probably will have a new FS...

What does Longhorn have anything to do with a wrapper for the existing NTFS, you fucking MS shill? Just ignore the fact that MS themself has essentially claimed that it's just a database abstraction layer - we don't care about facts, after all.

A filesystem is harder to break compatibility with than other things.

Er, no. It's no more difficult to break compatibility in a filesystem than in anything else - particularly if you're actually trying to. You'd only have to change one character in your source. Argueably, that's an easier compatibility fuck than most - unless we're talking hardware. Never underestimate the ability of humans to mess things up dreadfully.

Do not forget, breaking compatibility angers all of their customers.

How ignorant. Don't you realize that that is precisely what MS's business plan is - breaking compatibility repeatedly to milk more income into their coffers? That's why they do it. If they can get away with it, they'll do it. Thus, why they would do it in this situation - if somoene is already using linux, they've got little hope of keeping them as a customer perminantly. If "linux" breaks something, the person is more likely to blame linux instead of the fucked up ntfs driver.

Re:Not really

[Politburo]

Linux supporters will never acknowledge the skill of Windows programmers except on one issue: The ability to magically alter code so that it not only breaks everything Linux related, but corrupts your data. Somehow, this code keeps running perfectly on every existing Windows installation.

Then again, that kind of trick is always described as 'easy' as well, so I guess credit isn't being given. Though if it were so easy, you'd think Microsoft might be doing a bit more of it, no?

Exactly

[Overly Critical Guy]

That's right. They are Win32 emulators. That's why you can even run some Windows 1.0 executables (such as MS-DOS Executive) with minor tweaking.

stupid idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't the whole SCO mess start out with some idiots using SCO libraries on linux? So now some morons who can't plan out disk space usage get it into their heads to keep using ntfs under Linux. Brilliant.

Why? Just COPY the data over. If it's not an option then neither is Linux.

Don't use it. Avoid legal tar pits.

What about NT4 for non-x86 users?

[carndearg]

NT4 came in 4 flavours, i386, mips, ppc and alpha. And presumably all of these had a driver for NTFS.
Would these drivers, assuming you have an NT4 disk gathering dust, be a solution for non x86 users?

Not much help if you run Linux on ARM or 68k or something but there you go.

Re:What about NT4 for non-x86 users?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Which version of NTFS? I think there were some extensions thrown on it in going to NT5/NT2000. Can anyone who knows more on this verify?

I don't think MIPS or PPC made it to NT4. Alpha died early in NT4 cycle, maybe a service pack or two. You're looking at very old technology. This still looks like x86 only.

Re:What about NT4 for non-x86 users?

[carndearg]

I have an NT4 disk with those distributions on them so they definitely saw the light of day. IIRC MS ditched support for them about 1/2 way through NT4's life so the later service packs didnt come out for them. I never saw anyone who used them, but I remember a PCI card you could get which had a mips computer on it which was billed as turning your 486 or Pentium into a workstation. IIRC it was designed for the mips NT4 port.

Re:What about NT4 for non-x86 users?

[gamorck]

MIPS, PPC, and Alpha all had NT4 versions (fully. None of them made it to Windows 2000. The alpha version of win2k made it to Release Candidate 1 and was subsequently dumped by MS and Compaq.

Supporting Links:
http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/down loads/re commended/SP6/allSP6.asp
(Notice the inclusion of an DEC Alpha download for SP6 for NT4)

http://home1.gte.net/res008nh/nt/ppc/ntfaq.htm

J

Re:What about NT4 for non-x86 users?

[Anonymous Coward]

The NTFS.SYS driver shipped with NT4 SP5 is compatible with NTFS 5 (Windows 2000). I can't say for XP.

That shipped for Alpha and x86, but none of the other architectures. Dualbooting NT4 and NT5 Beta on Alpha was supported.

DMCA

[Cajun Hell]

If someone, somewhere in the world, uses NTFS to store some of their own copyrighted material, and they rely on Windows' permissions to restrict access to it, then NTFS is a technological measure that effectively limits access to a copyrighted work.

Distributing software that allow people to access the filesystem without duplicating all the security functionality, could be interpreted as trafficking in a circumvention device.

NTFSDOS

[Ratbert42]

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.

Re:NTFSDOS

[Pfhreakaz0id]

yep. they used to (not sure if still do) have a freeware read-only version of their win9x which would let you read your NTFS partition on a dual boot 9x/2000 box.

Re:NTFSDOS

[egoots]

They have an NTFS for Win95/98 product which provides access to NTFS disks from Win95/98. The limitations are that they don't provide the NTFS security model support (i.e. all files are accessible) and they dont support the encrypting file system.

See here for details.

Re:NTFSDOS

[cyberface]

There are two versions of NTFSDOS. The first is a free read-only driver which is their own code. The second is the full commercial read-write version, which uses the system's existing ntfs.sys driver with a wrapper.

Interestingly, if you're looking to repair unbootable NT/2k/XP partitions (or blag the SAM file by booting off a DOS floppy), the read-only version works on all versions of NT I've tried it on. Unfortunately, due to the reliance on the Windows ntfs.sys in the read-write version, one boot disk can't access all NT types (even actually amongst service packs). Both are still available afaik, at sysinternals.com

well...

[count0]

I'm using XP right now, and have a strange compulsion to wear long sleeves...maybe there's something to that 'MS denies me the right to bare arms' theory...

<pun>rimshot</pun>

Re:Great. What about ReiserFS, though?

[Fweeky]

There doesn't seem to be anything for the various incarnations of UFS either. A shame; I'd prefer UFS2+FFS+SU to NTFS any day, but Windows just doesn't seem to encourage alternate filesystems. Even AmigaOS had a couple of alternatives.

Sorry to be pedantic, but.....

[tiger99]

Win 9x is not an emulator, it is not an OS and does not even pretend to be one, except in Bill's imagination. It is a GUI sitting on top of a buggy old 16 bit OS. Of course, if someone wants to be even more pedantic, I will preempt you and suggest that in view of the timing involved, it is actually Bill's feeble attempt at emulation of what he thought a MAC, or maybe a Lisa, was supposed to be.

2K and XP do contain emulators for Messy-DOS and 9x. They also supposedly contain an emulator for Posix, but I have never been able to see the resemblance.

Re:Sorry to be pedantic, but.....

[Progman3K]

Hee hee hee! :-) I have to hand it to you Tiger, you certainly cut through the bullshiat of this discussion and bared the truth!

You're ABSOLUTELY right with what you said about the 9x Windows line NOT being true operating systems, but before we get modded out of existence at offtopic and whatever, let's just leave that other can 'o worms alone and be thankful those "OSes" are dying out.

Re:Sorry to be pedantic, but.....

[drsmithy]

Win 9x is not an emulator, it is not an OS and does not even pretend to be one, except in Bill's imagination.

Windows 95 performs task scheduling, memory management and (assuming all your hardware is supported) hardware I/O. Those are all classical OS functions.

It is a GUI sitting on top of a buggy old 16 bit OS.

It's a touch more complicated than that. DOS wasn't completely gone, but it wasn't calling all the shots, either.

2K and XP do contain emulators for Messy-DOS and 9x. They also supposedly contain an emulator for Posix, but I have never been able to see the resemblance.

Calling APIs "emulators" is a bit of a stretch, IMHO.

Re:Sorry to be pedantic, but.....

[Rallion]

Yeah, agreed...if the DOS/9x implementations in XP are emulators, WINE sure as hell is.

Also, DOS function in XP is kinda crappy. I keep 98 on here BECAUSE it's basically MS-DOS, not despite it.

Re:Sorry to be pedantic, but.....

[The Original Atrox]

Windows:

32 bit extentions to a 16 bit GUI pasted onto an 8 bit OS writen for a 4 bit CPU by a 2 bit company that cant stand 1 bit of competition.

Microft

i'd like to try it but it doesnt work

[kayen_telva]

sometimes it mounts, sometimes it doesnt.
when it does, I try to ls and get 'stale NFS file handle'
or operation not permitted.
so I'll play a little with it and report back here

Hmm

[dave1g]

I havent read the article only a ton of comments mostly because I'm not a Linux guy so I dont understand half of thats on that page.

Anyways, I think i read some people asking how to access ntfs formatted removable media.

Couldnt this driver when first used cache the NTFS.sys file on to your linux file system and then when ever the wrapper is used it will search the cache location first and if not found then search all the drives.

I dont know if each drive has a moddified NTFS.sys on it, I'm not sure how that works. But if they are all the same, then I dont see the problem.

I'm assuming the problem is that NTFS.sys is only located on the booting partition and not on other things such as a ntfs formatted zip disk.

Because...

[Balinares]

Grand-parent post doesn't hold MS to fault for the flaw itself, but for boasting about its supposedly 'more secure' FS. Which is, as you aptly demonstrate, mostly irrelevant to actual security.

Re:Because...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actual security in your mom's basement, maybe. But most real world NT and Novell fileservers really do use ACLs, and quite a few sites use the auditing feature (logs "take ownership" actions - which is impossible on stock Unix).

Re:Because...

[danheskett]

But has MS ever claimed NTFS to be secure outside of Windows? I mean.. they don't claim that it is encrypted or anything like that...

Whats the big deal again?

Huh?

[metalhed77]

And what's to stop people from using the old driver? Tons of weird offshore sites will start hosting it. At the very least it'll be available over IRC and P2P. Additionally, it'll be available to everyone with access to a WinXP computer. I'd say that this is a non-issue.

Re:Huh?

[Sneftel]

Of course it's an issue, because it removes the legitimacy of the RPMs, which is a major issue. when Microsoft Instant Unintentional Update #8793873 just happens to overwrite ntfs.sys, BAM--people using the automagic installer (which copies ntfs.sys from the NTFS partition) will run into big problems. Instead of getting that benefit, they'll have to extract ntfs.sys from a CAB on their windows CD which they hopefully still have lying around somewhere, or explicitly go out and find an illegal copy of ntfs.sys.

Re:Great. What about ReiserFS, though?

[Cthefuture]

Uh, rfstool maybe?

rfstool

Quick question about raid

[beyonddeath]

Im currently using windows software raid, however Id be interested in using another system if it worked cross-platform. Clearly the ntfs support here is marginal at best. So is there a way I can access these files on both systems while still having software striping? thanks

Anonymous FTP?

[mark_space2001]

I couldn't get NFS working with Windows a while back, and Samaba was too complicated for this home user. So I just went with anonymous FTP.

Everything on my home network is heavily firewalled, so there is no danger of intrusion. Anonymous FTP lets me browse my Linux box with Internet Explorer. It very convenient and easy to use. I can create, delete, rename, and copy with no problem. I haven't tried it yet (I don't run a gui on my Linux box) but using Mozilla from Linux to anonymous FTP on Windows should work exactly the same.

The translator *is* the emulation

[adiposity]

The extra layer, wherein an executable's calls are "translated" into *nix calls, is most certainly emulation. It allows an executable to run as if it were in one environment, even though it is not.

All an emulator is, is a translator. It's simply a question of how much is translated. If you want to say, "WINE is a really efficient emulator, because it doesn't have to translate every single assembly instruction," you'd be right. But it is STILL an emulator, because it still emulates having the win32 api.

Do win32 executables run on *nix systems? No, *nix systems don't know how to interpret them. By virtue of the WINE emulator, however, the part that *nix doesn't know how to run is translated into something that it does know how to run, while the part that is consistent between win32 and *nix can simply be passed through.

If WINE were not an emulator, you wouldn't have to run the win32 exes in WINE, you could just run them in the shell.

All that said, does the fact that WINE is really an emulator make it bad? No, of course not, especially since it is an extremely efficient one. Of course it's not a pure hardware emulator, so many ideas of inefficiency associated with emulators don't apply. But when you get right down to it, it's allowing binaries designed for one system to run on another, and even if it's more efficient than running on the original platform, that still makes it an emulator.

-Dan

Re:The translator *is* the emulation

[hitmark]

hmm, can you take wine and run win32 binarys on a mac?

Re:The translator *is* the emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtually everything that runs on the Windows NT kernel (NT/2000/XP/2003) is technically emulated too. Win32, Interix/Unix and the old OS/2 and POSIX calls are ultimately translated to the NT API (which can handle Windows, UNIX and formerly OS/2 semantics in terms of memory management, process creation, etc.). I think the API layers above the native NT API are still even called 'emulation subsystems' (even though parts of Win32 were moved to a loadable kernel module in NT4).

Despite emulating Windows, the NT OS is generally faster than Windows itself (95/98/Me), which implements the Win32 API directly. The emulation layer on NT is, therefore, an example of an emulator that's more efficient than the non-emulated platform.

Re:HPFS

[Anonymous Coward]

NT was able to mount HPFS (OS/2) volumes, though I think that was dropped in 2000 or XP??

Re:bah. i hate these. non-x86 users suffer.

[Cyno]

So..

Cry a river to Microsoft. They wrote NTFS, tell them to port it.

How much do you want to pay for it?

Don't like it? Don't use NTFS! And laugh at all your friends whenever you catch them doing it.

No, wine isn't advanced enough

[adiposity]

It can't emulate win32 x86 on a non-x86 platform. To work on Mac, it would need a hardware emulation layer, to translate x86 assembly into Gx assembly.

-Dan

Re:No, wine isn't advanced enough

[demon]

Funny, I seem to remember running Wine through qemu on my PowerBook to run sol.exe, just for the hell of it. Wine by itself can't, but that doesn't mean solutions aren't available to the problem.

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?

Re:What about Mac Users?

[AnimeFreak]

Uh. FAT32 has a limit much higher than 32 GB. It is more along the lines of being limited to 2 TB. The problem is that an older FAT32 formatting utility programme released by Microsoft has a problem recognising drives larger than 32 GB.

Re:What about Mac Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fat32 doesn't have a 32Gb limit, Windows XP enforces a fake 32Gb limit on it. It's OK if you use something else to create partitions bigger than 32Gb, and XP will use such partitions.

Re:What about Mac Users?

[stickb0y]

That's nonsense. FAT32 most certainly does not have a 32 GB limit.

Windows 2000 and XP refuse to create FAT32 partitions larger than 32 GB, but that's because Microsoft is trying to encourage people to use NTFS. IIRC FAT32 supports partition sizes up to 2 TB.

Windows 98 can create FAT32 partitions larger than 32 GB without any problems.

Re:What about Mac Users?

[Ice_Balrog]

Linux doesn't quite have full NTFS support, and the FreeBSD/Mach kernel (or whatever it was) has none (AFAIK).

It would be quite hard to write a NTFS driver for OS X.

Re:What about Mac Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bzzt. HFS+ _can_ be read by Windows.
http://www.mediafour.com
Google is your friend.

Re:What about Mac Users?

[__aawavt7683]

Fat32 has a 32gb limit.

I was looking into this the other day, as I was having trouble formatting my 60 gig USB2 hard drive. Funny.. formatted flawlessly in FreeBSD, excluding the fact that I had formatted the _DRIVE_ rather than the partition and windows couldn't read it. But, I got to looking, and MS support says that Windows 9x and 2k can't support fat32 over 32GB. Windows XP, however, has no problem with it.

This was quite annoying, as I always knew they claimed fat32 could cover partitions to 4TB or so...

-DrkShadow

Re:What about Mac Users?

[mst76]

Some posters commented in this thread that fat32 can support up to 2TB in theory, it's just that win2k/xp (perhaps also 98/me?) will not let you create or format such a partition. The problem with a 2TB fat32 partition is that the file allocation table itself will take up 256MB ram (or even 1GB if you want smaller clusters), see storagereview.

Re:bah. i hate these. non-x86 users suffer.

[swtaarrs]

So you're saying that x86 users, which are the vast majority of people who have a use for NTFS, should be deprived of something that works well just because it won't work for you? I'm all for cross-platform support, but your logic is quite selfish. If something works, use it.

Note to Mods

[malloc]

The correct response is: YHBTHAND, not "Insightful".

-Malloc

What about Other Windows Drivers

[SAJChurchey]

Does this mean that other drivers used for hardware (i.e. WinModems) might also be able to be emulated via this method?

Re:What about Other Windows Drivers

[kju]

You might have missed this story about driverloader then. Driverloader allows you to use some windows wireless lan drivers under linux. They have a software for conexant winmodems as well using windows drivers too.

Wait... lemme see if I understand this...

[Some Clown]

Hmm... start business, constantly act in a cutthroat way, become a multi-billionaire, company starts to have trouble, sell out and go live on a yacht somewhere in the South Pacific. Yeah... one day Bill will wake up, look at his bank statement, and feel horrible that at what his monopolistic actions have wrought. THPPPTT!!

First?Misread.

[Anonymous Coward]

"A lot of hardware will never have drivers for anything other than Windows. Is it a "waste of time" to let people use this hardware on their Linux machines?"

Especially this piece of hardware. And yes I and others have asked.

This isn't a new concept

[lalonso]

An NTFS driver/wrapper using ntfs.sys for Windows98 and DOS has been available for a long time... http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfswin 98.shtml

Here's some info, FYI

[Anonymous Coward]

Comment talks about debugging and ntfs driver

Perhaps this will allow them to get good debug info, as that post suggests.

I think macs are the future.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like linux, but with the support of a real company behind it to make it usable for idiots and easy to use/install drivers etc, but have a gutsy linux underbelly for all to see.

Why?

[Safiire Arrowny]

Why *is* it harder to read from an ntfs filesystem than to write to it?

The current ntfs kernel module is able to understand the formating of ntfs in order to read it, but shouldn't that same understanding allow them to code proper "write" access as well?

It's obviously true that it's more difficult, but why?

Re:Why?

[schon]

Why *is* it harder to read from an ntfs filesystem than to write to it?

Because NTFS is a (publically) undocumented cesspool of links, dependencies, and lists.

NTFS appears to be deliberately designed to be unusable by anything except Windows. People have gone mad attempting to understand the structure of NTFS - even MS only allows expendable programmers to look at the source, lest they become permanently damaged by it.

Rumor has it that when Bill Gates sold his soul to Satan, he was forced to bring NTFS from Hades to the moral realm.

USE FAT32 on a new partition?

[dbrower]

Yeah, but that is an unhelpful suggestion. People want to get at their existing installation w/o screwing with funny partitions. This scheme rocks; it gives you the migration path that is needed to let people try the Linux desktop w/o any downside to ending up with data on the wrong system unreadable to the other.

I have done the FAT32 partition thing to make tivo backups, only because linux wouldn't let me write to the NTFS C drive. It's a silly thing to make users do.

-dB

This isn't new...

[Fulg]

SysInternals used the same technique in NTFS for Windows98 a long time ago.

While I love the idea, I'm puzzled why it took this long for the Linux community to catch up...

Anything more annoying...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just great, I don't think there is a more annoying thing when dual-booting than not to be able to...

I dont think there's anything more annoying than dual-booting.... period.

Re:Anything more annoying...

[Anonymous Coward]

>I dont think there's anything more annoying than dual-booting.... period.
Sure there is - not being able to boot at all.

Re:HPFS

[ArhcAngel]

yes NT was able to mount HPFS partitions although they hid the driver in the file pinbal.sys
Since the early NTFS fs was HPFS with a security layer I wonder if the pinbal.sys file could be used with this wrapper for HPFS access?

Using this for a LiveCD Samba server

[|>>?]

This is funny, Serendipity is at it again. I just wrote an article on linmagau.org about the idea of introducing Samba and OSS into the Enterprise.

I suggested a Koppix-like CD and proposed a name: Sambix.

The article "What if the CIO doesn't know if they're running Linux?" is online now.

HERE is HOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

service packs! or google.
http://www.google.com/
search?hl=en&lr=& ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%2B%22Index+of+%2 F%22+%2Bntfs.sys+%2B%22Name++++++++++++++++++++Las t+modified%22&btnG=Google+Search
or search for
+"Index of /" +ntfs.sys +"Name"

Re:HPFS

[FxChiP]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Linux already have support for HPFS?

*checks kernel config*... yep. Full read and write, and the config doesn't say that it's dangerous or even experimental.

Insightfull

[eggsome]

Wow what a great idea! It is a bit messy but totally effective. You should drop a line to the Knoppix guys with that idea.

knoppix STD 0.1b mounts rw ntfs just fine (?)

[capt.mellow]

I keep a copy of Knoppix STD 0.1b in the drawer, and occasionally I boot it up, mount local & networked win2k partitions, and resume work as normal--I've done this for months w/ no prob's. The vanilla Knoppix will only mount ntfs partitions as ro, and gripes as well. Now, STD 0.1b has been out for a long time, so I assume that there must be a significant difference between the win2k & xp flavors of ntfs, and that this new hack pertains to the latter flavor?

My screwdriver makes a great hammer!

[t0ny]

I cant understand why Linux people are so desperate to always take Windows stuff. They have to use WINE (should be whine) because they dont have any good games, they need to make SAMBA because they dont have a real NOS, and now they need to 'borrow' NTFS because they cant make a NTFS driver of their own.

And 'of course' they are going to use an ntfs.sys which is on their licensed copy of Windows... Im sure they wouldnt dare get it off a warez site...

Re:My screwdriver makes a great hammer!

[Xabraxas]

I cant understand why Linux people are so desperate to always take Windows stuff. They have to use WINE (should be whine) because they dont have any good games, they need to make SAMBA because they dont have a real NOS, and now they need to 'borrow' NTFS because they cant make a NTFS driver of their own.

And 'of course' they are going to use an ntfs.sys which is on their licensed copy of Windows... Im sure they wouldnt dare get it off a warez site...

This is probably the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Linux uses WINE because Windows programs are the most prevalent and some people won't switch without them. SAMBA is needed for similar reasons. People need to share with Windows. Same deal with NTFS. This is not about taking anything from Windows. No one really wants to use Windows crap but it is a necessity if you want interoperation. MS doesn't seem to believe in open standards so this process is necessary.

I guess you just can't win in the Linux world. One person screams that Linux will never win out because there is not 100% interoperation between Windows and Linux. Then when interoperation is attempted someone screams about ripping Windows off. Get over it and make up your mind already.

Re:My screwdriver makes a great hammer!

[t0ny]

This is probably the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Linux uses WINE because Windows programs are the most prevalent and some people won't switch without them.

Its not dumb, its just not what you want to hear. As my title says, its using a screwdriver as a hammer. If you want to run something under Windows, run it in Windows instead of clunking it into an OS which it wasnt made for. Its amazing how several people I know run Linux, but all their software is running with WINE (and pretty poorly at that).

SAMBA is needed for similar reasons. People need to share with Windows.

As I said, SAMBA is needed because Linux isnt very good as a NOS. Netware doesnt need SAMBA, because it is a good NOS.

Same deal with NTFS. This is not about taking anything from Windows.

Really? It seems like it is at least taking the ntfs.sys- as I said, they cant get their second-tier operating system to work with Windows, so they have to keep borrowing parts of it for their own OS.

MS doesn't seem to believe in open standards so this process is necessary.

And why should MS use open standards ON THEIR OWN OPERATING SYSTEM? MS isnt telling the Linux community what they can and cant do on their OS, so why does the Linux community feel they should be able to tell MS's engineers what they should and shouldnt do? The big problem with free speach is that people tend to keep very deep seated, stupid opinions. Even the truth cannot convince them.

One person screams that Linux will never win out because there is not 100% interoperation between Windows and Linux. Then when interoperation is attempted someone screams about ripping Windows off.

Um, maybe thats because they ARE ripping Windows off? If they are such scarry good programmers, why do they need to use MS's ntfs.sys? Let them make their own driver! Basically, they are just admitting they cant do it, so they need to 'borrow' somebody else's work to get their task accomplished.

Thats kind of the problem with Open Source programmers- if they cant borrow somebody else's work, they are lost. Put them in a room with a computer and a programming reference book, and they cant do shit. Im by no means the world's best programmer, but put me in the same situation and I can put together something decent. Its just a different mentality- one needs to use the work of others, and the other is able to make their own solutions.

,i> Get over it and make up your mind already.

Given a similiar situation, I will say the same thing every time. If interop with Windows is so important, maybe they are using the wrong OS. I dont see Windows people crying that they cant run Mac or Linux software.

Re:My screwdriver makes a great hammer!

[Xabraxas]

You don't get it do you??

There are many people who will not use Windows for idealogical and/or security reasons but still need to interoperate with Windows machines. There are standards in technology for a reason. My computer should work with every other computer. Linux actively promotes this with open standards (just as it had been long before MS) but MS locks in their users. Since MS won't open up, then Linux has to do whatever it takes to open them up. THIS IS A GOOD THING. It is keeping the competition even. Anything to increase competition and bring down barriers in the software business is a good thing. What don't you get about that?

Re:My screwdriver makes a great hammer!

[t0ny]

There are many people who will not use Windows for idealogical and/or security reasons but still need to interoperate with Windows machines

As anybody who actually has an informed opinion knows, there are essentially no more/less security issues with Windows than with any other OS; the fact that you (and many other people) make that claim is just indicitive of how 'informed' your opinion is.

As for ideological issues, that is really their own problem. Look at the subject line to see what Im talking about... But my point is that a technological issue should be solved by choosing what is best for the task, not some foolish, ill-concieved 'holy war' ideology.

There are standards in technology for a reason

Thats right, there are. And MS has consistant standards between all their products. If you had an informed opinion, you would know the issue isnt no standards, but that those standards werent reached with outside concensus. MS creates their own standards, and uses them in their products, but is not beholden to an outside group telling them what they can and cant do. This is actually a benefit for them, because it allows them to set their own pace (popular concensus takes a long time, look at DVD, DDR RAM, etc. for examples of problems with this). Also, these standards bodies tend to be highly contrarian to MS, so why be part of something which is just going to be used for politics rather than getting problems solved?

MS is just going the capitalistic route, and letting the market decide the technology. Since the market is choosing MS products, it seems they are making correct decisions somewhere...

Since MS won't open up, then Linux has to do whatever it takes to open them up.

It is not Linux's place (or even their goal, since this is just you ranting) to change how MS does things. MS has interoperability with other NOS's without having to resort to theft; it would be nice to see Linux follow in their footsteps. However, since Open Source is based upon flagrant usage of unoriginal materials (which sometimes includes outright theft), its just a different mentality.

THIS IS A GOOD THING. It is keeping the competition even

First off, Linux isnt 'in competition' with MS. Even Torvalds has said this; the fact that people are making this a holy war is just their own stupidity hijacking his operating system. Second, I dont see how outright theft of MS's driver is a good thing. As I keep repeating like a mantra, if they need Linux to work with NTFS, they need to write their own driver rather than stealing MS's.

What don't you get about that?

I guess your ethics regarding theft are more flexible than mine. I generally try and live my life according to principles.

Re:My screwdriver makes a great hammer!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just stop replying and let the troll die. It's clear he just wants to hear himself argue... especially when his points are so misguided. It's also clear that for the most part he is just spewing what he has heard from others.

And for anybody actually following this thread:
The fact is that if it were not for interoperability with Windows, Linux doesn't *need* Samba, Wine or NTFS. Linux already has a better file system, sufficeint network file sharing options with network protocols superior to SMB, and lots of apps. (Some GREAT, some good enough.)

Yes, some apps are not represented, but most of us have no problem living without them. I (and a lot of people I know) ONLY use Windows for games. Even then I have several Linux-only or Linux-too games I like quite a lot. There are also a lot of cases where it is impossible to do something in Windows you can do easily in Linux.

Besides: Based on the troll's arguments, Windows is an inferior product. It requires something like Cygwin to run Linux apps, requires 3rd-party drivers to access "Linux" filesystems, and Windows users must boot into Linux to run some Linux games because they don't run under Windows.

Re:My screwdriver makes a great hammer!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just stop replying and let the troll die. It's clear he just wants to hear himself argue.

Here here! You can't attempt to argue with someone who is completely off-base and illogical. You start getting exchanges that go something like:

Turtles are the fastest swimmer in the ocean.

What!?!? No they aren't the can't reach over 20 MPH. Dolphins are much faster than that.

You don't know what you are talking about. Dolphins don't even have a shell, making turtles the fastest.

What does having a shell have to do with speed? Dolphins are much faster than turtles.

You obviously live in a dream world where you belive dolphins aren't mammals. They are though, so you clearly don't know what you are talking about.

Just one other thing:

[Progman3K]

If the Windows 9x line are not operating systems, but they do run or emulate a Win32 subset, then what is running Win32?

DOS?

I suppose so.

There is ONE thing to understand about Wine: It is in part a LOADER.

It loads x86 code segments directly from the executable's disk image into memory, and after dynamically linking (patching) the exports and exports tables, the x86 code runs DIRECTLY. Not in an "emulated" way, but just like it does in Windows...

So in theory, we can look to the day when after enough open-sourcing of Wine and React-Os will have happened, that it'll lead to an even-more-optimized implementation of Win32!

Without the MS-added cruft!

It has been shown (more than once) that Microsoft adds "special checks" in its operating systems so that when applications from competing vendors run on them, they either crash or are disabled.

Without that crufty, old, useless, and downright EVIL code in there, imagine how much better a Windows on *nix could be...

And with something like WineLib,

http://www.winehq.com/site/winelib

Someday you'll run on other chips AND OSes...

So in effect, as Microsoft continues to try to close it's net around developers and users, they'll simply class themselves into extinction.

Hmmm.... Maybe I should have titled this
"Windows is Dead"

Re:HPFS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Linux foreign file system support. Of course it's both dangerous and experimental.

Re:HPFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Hidden? The description string in the pinball.sys file on my old NT 3.51 CD is: HPFS File System Driver. I don't know why the file isn't called 'hpfs.sys', but it could scarcely be more obvious what it is. The name 'pinball.sys' was probably some 'in joke' about OS/2, among the NT developers.

With respect to the file systems themselves, NTFS is reasonably different from HPFS. It was developed by some of the same people, so it naturally bears a family resemblence; rather like NT and VMS. In familial terms, however, both are more akin to siblings than to a parent and child.

Re:HPFS

[Wolfrider]

--They must have only *recently* perfected write support for HPFS - I think 2.4.20 had "Experimental" write support. OS/2 has been dead for how many years now(?), and look how long it took for the kernel developers to fully stabilize the filesystem for Linux.

(This is NOT a troll/flamebait attempt. I stopped using Warp around '95 or '96, and switched to Linux ~1996-97.)

Re:OK... good - update

[sillybilly]

So there is a new story out on slashdot how the FAT partition is patented too. After reading the posts, here are some ideas: Frankly, FAT has been around for so long and I've seen so many things creating/reading/writing FAT filesystems for free, that basically MS lost their right to royalties. According to patent law you can't allow the unpoliced proliferation of a technology without collecting royalties, and then once everyone is hooked, start asking for fees. Or at least that's how the law should read. Also FAT is hardly an invention, it's such a poor knocked-together file system design that anyone skilled in the art would have taken from granted. Yeah back in 1980 it made sense to keep things simple because there wasn't enough speed/power back in those days, but still, FAT is hardly an invention.

captive website blocked

[stock]

as of Monday 8 december 2003 02:00h CET the http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/ website is blocked by some proxy error :

502 Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.

The proxy server could not handle the request GET /project/captive/Index.html.pl.

Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused

Apache/1.3.28 Server at www.jankratochvil.net Port 80

Robert