Install gentoo on NTFS partition

[Athaphian]

Hello,

Ive searched both the forums and google as good as I can to find a solution, but Ive not found it so far, thus this post.

I have an existing partitioned disk with all ntfs partitions on it, which I do not want to resize, shrink or move. I would like to try to install gentoo on one of those partitions. It's odd I know, dont ask! I know it will be technically possible since linux seems to support reliable ntfs write support by now. However, the gentoo liveCD does not seem to have this functionality... Ive tried emerge, but obviously it could not write all the files to the readonly filesystem.

Is there a way to get (possibly without rebuilding the liveCD?) ntfs write support enabled when booted from the 2007.0 liveCD ?

Thanks in advance,
Athaphian

[intmain]

Even if you could write to an NTFS partition from the LiveCD you will not be able install Gentoo there. It simple is not possible to install Linux on an NTFS partition because NTFS does not support file permissions as used in Linux, symlinks and so on which is needed to install Linux.

If you don't want to modify your partitions you should try installing Gentoo in VMware, VirtualBox or qemu.

[Athaphian]

Hmm.. realy? I didnt think about that ..

Thats a shame.. but there are some linux distro's I read about somwhere that need to be installed on ntfs.. like lindows, or is this a fable too? Well anyway, maybe I will try to install it on a usb hdd, my pc is able too boot windows xp from that, so why not linux. There I can format a few ext3 partitions.

The reason why I dont want to use vmware or any virtualisation is because I want to try out xen and its performance, so that would be virtualisation inside virtualisation. But my current hdd is a bit hard to repartition right now.

Thanks for your answer.

[NeoWolf]

There was a linux distro that could install on a FAT32 partition at one point but it was really freakish and far from ideal. Lindows actually became Linspire.

[Naib]

There is *one* option IF you really don't want to re-size yr NTFS partition...

you install to a image file. This aint like virtual-machine (vmware,virtual-box) but more a big datafile WHICH a windows-version of GRUB can boot from
http://wubi-installer.org/
While this will install Ubuntu (using a windows-installer) a similar method *could* in theory be used to install gentoo into a similar image

So you will be booting into a native-linux, but it wont be on its own partition (as such).

It would be alot of hassle mind and it would be simpler just to use gparted to free up some actual disk

[i92guboj]

This is plainly not possible without serious hacking, and certainly, it can't be done on a conventional distro without patching almost every possible package by hand. As said above, NTFS and FAT do no support symlinks or linux attributes, to start with. That makes it impossible to install a normal linux system on it.

This is not a problem with linux, it is just that those filesystems are too limited and can't provide enough functionality. They just weren't designed to run a *nix OS on them.

You might have better luck if you look into vmware, qemu as suggested above.

[jeanfrancis]

I would resize the partitions and create Linux partitions on the disk... Much simpler... My two cents

[agent_jdh]

Apparently you can use ntfs-3g to install on an ntfs partition.

[jeanfrancis]

Apparently you can use ntfs-3g to install on an ntfs partition.

To read and write, yes, but not to install on it... As written before, NTFS does not support symlinks, don't use the same file ownership/protection, etc..

[i92guboj]

It is not that hard to understand. If you just look into the system directories, you will find that half of the stuff there are symlinks. Just a sample so you get the idea:

Code: Select all

┌─(lun jul 30, 03:11:18)-(root@jesgue.homelinux.org)-(/home/i92guboj)-·
└─[13]-> # ls -l /usr/bin/ | head -n 20
total 272176
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      29488 may  1 20:43 [
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root        201 jul 23 03:23 7z
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root        202 jul 23 03:23 7za
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root       1382 jul 23 03:23 7zg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root        202 jul 23 03:23 7zr
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root     102512 jul 23 07:21 a2p
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      19432 jul 23 13:23 a52dec
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root         11 jul 17 04:15 abiword -> abiword-2.4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root         11 jul 17 04:15 abiword-2.4 -> AbiWord-2.4
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    5549208 jul 17 04:15 AbiWord-2.4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root         27 jul 23 01:42 aclocal -> ../lib64/misc/am-wrapper.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      30647 jul 23 13:14 aclocal-1.10
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      11405 jul 23 13:04 aclocal-1.4
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      12731 jul 23 13:04 aclocal-1.5
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      12387 jul 23 13:03 aclocal-1.7
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      19345 jul 23 13:03 aclocal-1.8
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      19979 jul 23 20:52 aclocal-1.9
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      16080 jun 27 21:45 aconnect
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root       9304 jul 23 06:11 acpi_listen
┌─(lun jul 30, 03:11:25)-(root@jesgue.homelinux.org)-(/home/i92guboj)-·
└─[14]-> # ls -l /lib*/*.so | head -n 20
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  108948 jul 27 19:55 /lib32/ld-2.6.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    9688 jul 27 19:55 /lib32/libanl-2.6.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      13 jul 23 05:59 /lib32/libblkid.so -> libblkid.so.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    5316 jul 27 19:55 /lib32/libBrokenLocale-2.6.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      15 jul 23 05:59 /lib32/libbz2.so -> libbz2.so.1.0.3
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1229040 jul 27 19:55 /lib32/libc-2.6.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  181604 jul 27 19:55 /lib32/libcidn-2.6.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      15 jul 23 05:59 /lib32/libcom_err.so -> libcom_err.so.2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      17 jul 23 05:59 /lib32/libcrack.so -> libcrack.so.2.8.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   21792 jul 27 19:55 /lib32/libcrypt-2.6.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      17 jul 23 05:59 /lib32/libcurses.so -> libncurses.so.5.5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      18 jul 23 05:59 /lib32/libcursesw.so -> libncursesw.so.5.5
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    9568 jul 27 19:55 /lib32/libdl-2.6.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      11 jul 23 05:59 /lib32/libe2p.so -> libe2p.so.2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      14 jul 23 05:59 /lib32/libext2fs.so -> libext2fs.so.2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      11 jul 23 05:59 /lib32/libgpm.so -> libgpm.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      15 jul 23 05:59 /lib32/libhistory.so -> libhistory.so.5
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  141020 jul 27 19:55 /lib32/libm-2.6.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   13620 jul 27 19:55 /lib32/libmemusage.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      15 jul 23 05:59 /lib32/libncurses.so -> libncurses.so.5

You can't create symlinks into a ntfs partition. So, absolutely everything will be broken. It is not a complex thing to understand.

Not to count on the other problem: being unable to use linux file atributes means this: you can't even set the 'x' flag for files, which means that you will not be able to mark any file as executable. I hope you understand what that means. Unlike Windows, which base that attribute in file extensions like .exe and many more, linux needs the file attributes to mark a file as executable. There is no way around that as far as I know.

[cyrillic]

I have an existing partitioned disk with all ntfs partitions on it, which I do not want to resize, shrink or move...

Just install a second harddrive, and install Gentoo on it.
It doesn't get much easier than that.

[jeanfrancis]

I have an existing partitioned disk with all ntfs partitions on it, which I do not want to resize, shrink or move...

Just install a second harddrive, and install Gentoo on it.
It doesn't get much easier than that.

+1

[To]

And everybody has an old disk around;)

[user11]

You might format existing NTFS partition to linux FS. That involves neither of resize/shrink/move.

[irgu]

ntfs-3g supports symlinks. From the manual at http://linux.die.net/man/8/ntfs-3g

ntfs-3g is an NTFS driver, which can create, remove, rename, move files, directories, hard links, and streams; it can read and write files, including streams and sparse files; it can handle special files like symbolic links, devices, and FIFOs ......

It's also possible to install Gentoo to NTFS, at least it worked for me. The only trick was to use the 'dev' mount option because ntfs-3g uses the 'nodev' option by default due to security reasons.

User and file permission handling is not implemented yet and any such operation results success by default which means no real file level security. Everything is single user which is not really useful. But otherwise anything else just worked fine.

A more popular technique which doesn't require repartitioning and new disk is to install on a loop mounted image file on NTFS. E.g. what WUBI does.

[Frostwarrior]

Yeah but, you cant install linux on NTFS neither, because the driver is a package, it is not in the linux kernel

[Habbit]

Yeah but, you cant install linux on NTFS neither, because the driver is a package, it is not in the linux kernel

That's no biggie, in principle. Just make sure that the both the FUSE kernel module and the mount.ntfs-3g binary, along with their required libraries and (maybe) a stripped-down version of fstab containing the partition mount options, are included in your initrd.

About the permissions: *nix-like permissions _could_ be supported in an NTFS partition, just by assigning NT SIDs to *nix UIDs, but the main focus of the ntfs-3g driver is to provide Windows compatibility, not open a new filesystem for full Linux use, just like Windows ext2/3 drivers do not allow you to install the OS on an ext3 volume. We have enough good filesystems in here (ext2/3/4, reiser3/4, jfs, xfs...) to need a new one.

[i92guboj]

Yeah but, you cant install linux on NTFS neither, because the driver is a package, it is not in the linux kernel

That's no biggie, in principle. Just make sure that the both the FUSE kernel module and the mount.ntfs-3g binary, along with their required libraries and (maybe) a stripped-down version of fstab containing the partition mount options, are included in your initrd.

About the permissions: *nix-like permissions _could_ be supported in an NTFS partition, just by assigning NT SIDs to *nix UIDs, but the main focus of the ntfs-3g driver is to provide Windows compatibility, not open a new filesystem for full Linux use, just like Windows ext2/3 drivers do not allow you to install the OS on an ext3 volume. We have enough good filesystems in here (ext2/3/4, reiser3/4, jfs, xfs...) to need a new one.

That perfectly sums it all up.

There is no reason to do so, no advantage. Only potential problems. Using external modules/files is not a problem if you don't mind having and initrd image. A lot of people usually use it just to load a boot splash, which is also another useless thing, though probably a *bit* less problematic.