anyone use NTFS write support?

Message

stefanwa · Post by **stefanwa** » Tue Jun 17, 2003 12:47 pm

Hi!

Does anyone actually use NTFS write support? I do dualboot and it would be great to use same harddisk at times. I don't want to go to FAT32 on this drive.
How dangerous is it really to enable write support? I'm not in a production environment, so if really something should go wrong it's not that bad. Any statistics for the chance that everything will be messed up?
I'm using kernel 2.5 by the way. Perhaps the NTFS drivers have improved.

Korean Ian · Post by **Korean Ian** » Tue Jun 17, 2003 12:56 pm

I wouldn't touch it. One file *could* nuke your NTFS partition. Then you have to do recovery and al that.. even if your files aren't 'that important'. I don't know this for certian but if the devs recommend you don't use it, I wouldn't either.

FAT 32 is the way to go on this one, although it is slower and less file size efficent. (Sorry I know you didn't want to hear that.. But it's the truth)

MS

Forse · Post by **Forse** » Tue Jun 17, 2003 1:03 pm

stefanwa wrote:Hi!

Does anyone actually use NTFS write support? I do dualboot and it would be great to use same harddisk at times. I don't want to go to FAT32 on this drive.
How dangerous is it really to enable write support? I'm not in a production environment, so if really something should go wrong it's not that bad. Any statistics for the chance that everything will be messed up?
I'm using kernel 2.5 by the way. Perhaps the NTFS drivers have improved.

Well why don't u try? Create NTFS partition and use write support and see if it's worth the trouble. Post comments if u choose to give it a shot

Stiffler · Post by **Stiffler** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 6:13 pm

So, has anyone tried this since then?

Anime_Fan · Post by **Anime_Fan** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 6:52 pm

I wouldn't touch NTFS write support with a 10-feet pole.

I did read somehwere that after you had written files to NTFS, you should use some NTFS tools in Linux before rebooting, and when booting Windows, do a full scandisk to repair the remaining damage.

I'd rather do FAT32 in smaller partitions - should be faster if you consider that it won't make you be scared to death after writing a single file to the fs...

You might wanna try ext2 for Windows like one of my friends did for OS interoperability.

paranode · Post by **paranode** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 7:41 pm

If I remember correctly, the problem had something to do with NTFS being tied into the Windows registry. For this reason, I don't think Linux could ever have a perfect driver to write to NTFS drives. There may be more to the story but that's what I remember hearing.

zeky · Post by **zeky** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 8:29 pm

Stiffler wrote:So, has anyone tried this since then?

/me is still using NTFS write support without any problems EVER

As far as i know, it works fine for me

El_Presidente_Pufferfish · Tue Jul 15, 2003 8:33 pm

oohhh z3ky, now i want to try, and with my luck my computer will explode

syadnom · Post by **syadnom** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 10:07 pm

the problem is that NTFS is a closed file system. the Linux NTFS system is a reverse engineered system and is not truely 100% compatible. If you are useing NTFS on a non-OS drive then it should be fine, but if you have windows on the partition, then dont write to it. It WILL eventually F&*K up.

Stiffler · Post by **Stiffler** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 10:32 pm

z3ky wrote:
Stiffler wrote:So, has anyone tried this since then?
/me is still using NTFS write support without any problems EVER

As far as i know, it works fine for me

Really? What about Anime_Fans' talk about NTFS tools and such? Does it work just like a regular file system, or do you do special maintainance on it?

Jimboberella · Post by **Jimboberella** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 11:54 pm

z3ky wrote:
Stiffler wrote:So, has anyone tried this since then?
/me is still using NTFS write support without any problems EVER

As far as i know, it works fine for me

But z3ky have you ever booted into windows on that partition / or that uses that partition as a system disk since writing to it in Linux?

In my experience, and I've tried this twice, it does corrupt the filesystem to alter files on an existing NTFS volume. I was able to recover the filesystem but thats a pain in the ass when you want to boot windows on the odd occasion.

Stiffler · Post by **Stiffler** » Wed Jul 16, 2003 12:34 am

Jimboberella wrote:
z3ky wrote:
Stiffler wrote:So, has anyone tried this since then?
/me is still using NTFS write support without any problems EVER

As far as i know, it works fine for me
But z3ky have you ever booted into windows on that partition / or that uses that partition as a system disk since writing to it in Linux?

In my experience, and I've tried this twice, it does corrupt the filesystem to alter files on an existing NTFS volume. I was able to recover the filesystem but thats a pain in the ass when you want to boot windows on the odd occasion.

So, are you saying that the corruption is only noticable if the dirve/partition is a system disk? So, if it is file storage only, you wouldn't notice corruption at all?

Anime_Fan · Post by **Anime_Fan** » Wed Jul 16, 2003 6:54 am

Quote from http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/downloads.html#ntfs:
NTFS Tools

This package contains the userspace tools to accompany the NTFS driver in the kernel. If you must use the write support in the old driver, then it is important that you run ntfsfix afterwards. mkntfs will create a new NTFS volume on a partition or floppy. You will need to download the -devel package (headers) if you want to compile the tools.
N.B. This package does not contain the kernel driver.

----

I'm guessing I must've lived in an old world, then... It's still unstable though. Too many mishaps, and the fs gets it...

nephros · Post by **nephros** » Thu Jul 17, 2003 4:09 pm

I completely hosed two Windows installs with NTFS write support. chkdsk failed, recovery failed, I had to reformat and reinstall.

I don't know about non-system partitions, mine were both "C:" (well, actually they were /dev/hdc2 and hdf1, but grub persuaded windows to believe otherwise...).

From that point on I used a VFAT partition to swap files, plus the ext2 plugin for the lovely TotalCommander to read directly from my /home.
Yes, FAT may be bad, but fs performance isn't really the issue with .mp3s, videos and ISOs now is it.

butters · Post by **butters** » Thu Jul 17, 2003 5:52 pm

According to Dave Jones the current status of the new NTFS code is that it will support safe writing to an NTFS partition only for overwriting a file that will result in no change in the file's original size. So, other than in that isolated case, there are no guarantees that NTFS write support won't corrupt your filesystem.

jbstew32 · Post by **jbstew32** » Fri Jul 18, 2003 5:09 pm

so NTFS has components that reside within the window's registry, thus preventing an alternative OS to be full write compliant? Yeah, I bet that was done by pure accident on Microsofts part

princeofchaos · Post by **princeofchaos** » Fri Jul 18, 2003 6:29 pm

Actually not, NTFS is a journaling filesystem which means that every transaction (creating/removing/renaming files, changing file size, etc.) has to be recorded in several places - if you forget about one of them (easy to do if you don't have the docs), FS is screwed.

jbstew32 · Post by **jbstew32** » Fri Jul 18, 2003 7:48 pm

ah that makes more sense.

barmalini · Post by **barmalini** » Thu Jul 31, 2003 1:47 pm

I've been using NTFS for shared file storage partition for a few months with Mandrake 9.1.
Nothing terrible happen since then besides that one garbage directory emerged in root. Something like this: D:\~$#%#---&^&\. The size of this directory is 4096 bytes, same as the size of NTFS sector in my case. I didn't try to do anything about it as it does not hurt much. So generally I can describe my experience as neutral to positive.

Mr. Hahn · Post by **Mr. Hahn** » Thu Jul 31, 2003 2:21 pm

hmm does ext2 appear in windows so you can read an write to it? I know I had an ext2 partition once that windows saw as a drive, but could not get into w/o formatting. It would be nice to have a filesystem I can read and write to in both oses that is larger than a fat32.

Mr. Hahn · Post by **Mr. Hahn** » Thu Jul 31, 2003 2:30 pm

oh nm, it appears you can write w/ explore2fs long as your are on an ext2 filesystem.

tomaw · Post by **tomaw** » Thu Jul 31, 2003 8:03 pm

Does the program still ignore all file security?

skyfolly · Post by **skyfolly** » Fri Aug 29, 2003 3:44 pm

I will give it a try on a NTFS partition which nothing is installed there!

anyone use NTFS write support?

anyone use NTFS write support?

Re: anyone use NTFS write support?

dont..