Thanks to all for their advice. I'm feeling much better, and will only format C for NTFS. Mike On Saturday 24 May 2003 4:08 am, Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote:
On Fri, 23 May 2003, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
I'm given to understand that it was/is OK for Linux to *read* files on NTFS partitions, but that NT became unhappy if Linux were to *write* to such a file.
There are two completely different NTFS drivers for Linux.
The old one (version 1.x.y) is included in the official 2.4 kernels but completely abandoned by NTFS developers. It has write support only for NT4 and it can indeed damage NT4 data if one enabled write. However write is totally disabled for Windows XP/2003/2000 NTFS filesystems. In short, nobody can damage data on the later Windows partitions because it's impossible to mount the partition read-write, the driver falls back to read-only mode supposed one uses one of the latest stable kernels.
The new, rewritten (version 2.x.y) NTFS driver is included in the 2.5 series development kernels and also has a backported version for the latest 2.4 stable kernel. What's its benefit?
+ Stable: no known problems in the implemented functionality, it's also multi-processor and reentrant safe.
+ Supports all NTFS cluster sizes from 512 bytes up to 64 kB. The old one is limited to maximum 4 kB cluster size.
+ Full support for sparse and compressed files also on Windows XP/2003/2000.
+ Supports mmap() thus Wine users can start applications from an NTFS partition.
+ One can setup a loopback device on an NTFS file. TopologiLinux uses this feature to run completely from a Windows NTFS partition (read-write). This is a frequently asked feature by Knoppix users but Knoppix can't do it because it uses the old driver.
+ Still read-only, but with safe file overwrite support on all Windows versions without changes to the file size. TopologiLinux also heavily uses this feature.
+ Much better performance.
What NTFS driver Linux distributions use? This is what we know about:
+ New driver: Mandrake, SuSE, Gentoo, ASPLinux, TopologiLinux, Phat Linux.
+ Old driver: Debian, Knoppix, Slackware.
+ No driver: Red Hat.
If one has comments, problems with the _new_ driver, please let us know at linux-ntfs-dev@lists.sf.net, no subscription is required. Project page is at http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ Thanks,
Szaka
-- Mike McCallister "The fundamental obligation of a revolutionary New Berlin, WI is to tell the truth; workingwriter@prodigy.net the other is to always carry a pen." Notes from the Metaverse: http://radio.weblogs.com/0124049