On Thursday 22 April 2004 12:10 pm, Brad Shelton wrote:
On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 12:51, Donald Grayson wrote:
NTFS filesystems have database like structures that make writing to them extremely difficult. It is quite easy to destroy your NTFS filesystem if you try from inside Linux.
You can safely mount and read an NTFS volume but I would seriously avoid attempting to write to one. There are tools to let Windows read your EXT/ReiserFS file systems, also in a read only mode so that you could boot into Windows and copy over the data from there. Or you could setup a 'shared' drive either internal or external USB and format it with FAT32, which both OSes can read and write to.
If one had an additional disk, they might consider mounting it with a vfat system on it so it is commonly available to both Winders and Leeeenux.
Just a thought... that's what I do, anywho....
Brad Shelton
Sage advice and very well worth heeding. Since you already have a valid license for XP check out http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/. This does give you read/write support for NTFS through Linux. Take adequate precautions for your data as usual such as good restores. Captive relies on the latest Microsoft NTFS drivers from XP so there is less chance of corrupting your NTFS files versus an open source NTFS driver that doesn't have access to the closed source Microsoft drivers. I have my data on NTFS preserved elsewhere and use captive under SUSE 2.4.21-203 with VMWare 4.5 also accessing the same partition. So far so good. Win2K boots to the same partition no problem. Stan