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Using the Real ntfs.sys Driver Under Linux
caseih writes "A very neat hack uses the real ntfs.sys driver (obtained from your own windows XP partition and used via a wine-like layer (borrowed from ReactOS) to mount an ntfs partion with full read/write access. While not an ideal solution and certainly not free as in speech, this is an ideal stop-gap measure for many people trying out linux. I think that we'll probably see this in Knoppix pretty soon."
Surely it is illegal to copy the ntfs.sys driver and distribute it in another operating system, seeing as how it is a part of Windows.
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?
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).
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
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.
I wonder how it's going to be done in Knoppix, without distributing a commercial DLL with the CD. Perhaps the following scheme could work:
Tricky. Depends on having the DLL somewhere on the disk.
-- Arik
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
This is similar to the current situation with Quicktime, Real and WMV playback on Linux - there is a technical solution, but it is illegal. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that the companies developing these secret formats will ever port to Linux, and even less likely that they will make them open source.
This would be very useful if you have an unbootable windows partition. I had problems with my logon file in XP once. I had replaced it to try something and ended up hosing my system. I had the file backed up but I couldn't use the Windows XP command line recovery because it couldn't logon and I couldn't copy it back over in Linux because of poor NTFS support. This would help people being able to fix the same or similar problems.
Aston Games
I don't care if it's not free as in speech. I've been waiting for a long time for some stable read/write support for my dual-booting system. If it's as stable at reading/writing as Windows, then this will be a great hack.
It would be perfectly legal for Knoppix to *know* that you might have an NTFS.SYS around on your computer, look around to see whether this is the case, and if it is, use your own copy NTFS.SYS.
Of course, Knoppix will never itself be packaged with the NTFS.SYS. But if you have an NTFS partition, you have a damn good chance of having an NT around as well, with the driver right in there.
I can only hope that MS doesn't insert some nastiness into the NTFS.SYS that would prevent it from running inside the framework described in TFA.
HTH
VKh
That sort of thing is exactly what this is good for. Let's say you give a Linux distro to a friend so he can try it out. This could be a Live CD or a distro that will make your system dual boot.
In any case, your friend probably has a bunch of files on his Windows partition (likely NTFS formatted) that he wants to see if he can edit/view in Linux. If he can do what he wants, then switching to Linux becomes an option. So, with this, his NTFS partition is available and everything just works(TM). After all, your friend doesn't even know what NTFS is, but he does know when he can't get at his files.
In short, this makes transitions to Linux much smoother. People shouldn't have to keep a copy of a file on both partitions just so its available in both environmets. It becomes a pain to figure out which document is the most recent, etc. etc. And, BTW, I'm talking about the average user who doesn't have a network drive.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Merry Christmas. Here you go:
Explore2fs
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.
It would not seem unreasonable for the ntfs driver to be copied to a USB key or other media to be used at boot time.
Optimally, like the other suggestions, this driver should be moved during config time, but I would be willing to load it my USB doohickey prior to booting Knoppix/Mandrake Live/whatevernix.
I have valid Windows NT/2000/XP licenses on my machine, or I wouldn't have the NTFS partition to begin with. Maybe that's not a guaranteed assumption, and IANAL, but I don't think it would put too many MS lawyers on alert if it were done that way.
Perhaps a copyright/license file stating "These files are to be used on computer systems with valid Windows NT/2000/XP licenses only." when they are copied to the USB Key.
Design for Use, not Construction!
For Windows NT 4.0
For Windows 95
For Windows NT/2000/XP
For DOS, Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP, OS/2, BeOS, MacOS...
Money for nothing, pix for free
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.
Such boasts are obviously proved empty by full read write access from a boot disk
Any non encrypted filesystem would have all access controls subverted when mounted under a foreign operating system. Claiming anything else is absurdity. Do you think that ext2 holds the chmod based security when I mount it up under a box that it wasnt created under? You do realize that any user with root on any Linux box could simply reset all the attributes meant to keep users off/let them in under a different box?
Why would you hold MS to fault for something that is unversial and by its nature fundamental?
those of us on non-x86 platforms that want read/write NTFS access to external (firewire / usb2.0) drives will only suffer due to driver emulation layers like this.
it satisfys much of the normal x86 crowd which means development of the real driver suffers.
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:
While its 'write-safe', the writes it can do is completely useless to most people.
"The only supported operation is overwriting existing files, without changing the file length. No file or directory creation, deletion or renaming is possible. Note only non-resident files can be written to so you may find that some very small files (500 bytes or so) cannot be written to."
Maybe using the windows NTFS driver this way will help provide enough debug info to complete this driver
God Fucking Damnit
I 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.
When will us Mac users get NTFS support?
I'm not sure if you realize it, but there is no easy solution for using an external hard drive over 32gb with multiple platforms.
As of this driver, it appears that NTFS is probably the best way to do this, as it now has Linux support.
Windows or MacOS don't support Ext3 natively, and the 3rd party drivers are slow. Fat32 has a 32gb limit. Mac HFS+ can't be read by Windows.
How easy could it be to write an NTFS driver for OS X?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Well, that's okay, as long as we still have a recursive acronym: WINE Is Now an Emulator.