[Gllug] Win&Lin accessible filesystems

[Pete Ryland]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 09:55:05AM +0000, John Edwards wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 09:17:51AM -0000, Paul Brazier wrote:
> > I've got a dual-boot Win2K/Linux PC and I want to have a partition
> > accessible (r/w) to both OSs.
> > 
> > NTFS doesn't seem to be supported as standard by my kernel and looking
> > at the "make xconfig" it looks like it's a little experimental (the
> > write part at least). This seems strange as NTFS has been around a while
> > - is it due to MS keeping the specs secret or something?
> 
> Yes, and MS changed NTFS subtly in Windows 2000 (to version 5 I believe).
> It's rather difficult to write for a filesystem that is closed, secret 
> and changes over time. There was a guy who was going to rewrite it based 
> on knowledge he had gained when his company did some work for Microsoft 
> but I think that died out due to legal threats.
> 
> Enabling write support in NTFS is labelled as "highly dangerous", as there 
> have been reports of it corrupting filesystems.

It's labelled as highly dangerous because if you don't read the HOWTO it
is actually guaranteed to damage your filesystem.

Every time you write to the filesystem, you have to make sure you run a
certain utility (from the ntfs-tools package iirc) after unmounting it to
fix the damage the read/write driver has caused.

I've actually heard rumours of a Win2k driver that can read ext2 partitions.
Maybe you could try looking for that.  I found
http://www.int13.org/thelist.htm quickly on google which is prolly a good
starting place.

Pete
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