Quote:
Originally posted by Ioncannon@May 13 2006, 10:39 PM
hmm, ubuntu can't read NTFS can it?
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I'm not a Ubuntu user, so the following is slight conjecture (but keep in mind that this applys regardless to anyone experienced enough to compile their own kernel). Don't hold me to it.
NTFS support really started getting somewhere in the 2.4 series (kernel, that is) and has really taken a leap forward in the 2.6 tree. The MFT format is understood well enough that read support has been stable for at least a couple of years now. However, due to some really odd -- and obviously undocumented -- ways that Windows handles file creation and resizing, write support is ridiculously dangerous. Write support is coming along, and there's a FUSE (think microkernel-esq user-space drivers) driver which has better write support but is still pretty spotty.
In summary, read-only mounting: usable and stable; read/write mounting: dangerous though half-supported.
This is all kernel-level stuff (don't get pedantic about the FUSE driver) and as such a Ubuntu user would be wise to check for available packages for the NTFS driver (and I'd be surprised if none of the shipped default kernels supported it).
Also, and highly unrecommended: there exists a tool somewhere (the name of which slips my mind) which allows you to use the Windows NTFS driver with Linux-the-kernel. It pretty much requires you're running on a dualboot machine with a valid Windows installation, though (but then again, if you weren't, what would be the point?).