Current status of NTFS support
Where does write support for NTFS stand at the moment? I noticed that it's still marked "Dangerous" in the kernel configuration. This is important to me because it looks like I'll have to start using it next week. My office laptop is going to be "upgraded" from Windows 98 to 2000. Of course, I hardly ever boot into Windows any more since installing a Linux partition last year. But our corporate email standard forces me to use Lotus Notes, which I run under
Wine. The Notes executables and databases are installed on my Windows
partition. The upgrade, though, will involve wiping the hard drive, allocating the whole drive to a single NTFS partition, and reinstalling Notes after installing Windows 2000 . That means bye-bye FAT32 partition and hello NTFS. I can't mount it read-only because I'll still have to update my Notes databases from Linux. So how risky is this?
Also, I'll have to recreate my Linux partitions after the upgrade. Does anyone know if FIPS can split a partition safely that was created under Windows 2000/NT? It worked fine for Windows 98, but I'm a little worried about what might happen if I try to use it on an NTFS partition.
I'd appreciate any advice or help anyone can give me. There's just no way I can stand going back to using anything but Linux for my daily work.
Wayne
Quoted 4 lines · [email protected] wrote:
Where does write support for NTFS stand at the moment?
I'll let someone who knows about that answer that part ;)
Quoted 5 lines
Also, I'll have to recreate my Linux partitions after the upgrade. Does anyone know if FIPS can split a partition safely that was created under Windows 2000/NT? It worked fine for Windows 98, but I'm a little worried about what might happen if I try to use it on an NTFS partition.
Last time I checked (about 2 months ago) FIPS was not able to work with NTFS partitions - you'll probably have to use Partition Magic or something similar to modify the NTFS partition (but why not just create the NTFS partition of a smaller size and then use the unpartitioned space for a ext2 partition?).
Best regards,
Jesper Juhl - [email protected]
Quoted 6 lines · [email protected] wrote:
partition. The upgrade, though, will involve wiping the hard drive, allocating the whole drive to a single NTFS partition, and reinstalling Notes after installing Windows 2000 . That means bye-bye FAT32 partition and hello NTFS. I can't mount it read-only because I'll still have to update my Notes databases from Linux. So how risky is this?
Why? Just us FAT32 instead of NTFS.Also, Why the repartition? Just reformat the old FAT32 partition and install over that.
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Also, I'll have to recreate my Linux partitions after the upgrade. Does anyone
Oll you should need is a boot floppy to get back into linux and fix the MBR (rerun lilo?) after the Windows install.
Don't try to write to and NTFS partition from linux. You probably don't want to mount the Win2k version of NTFS in linux either. At one point that could damage the filesystem too.
-Thomas
Quoted 1 line · At 23:08 20/04/2001, [email protected] wrote:
Where does write support for NTFS stand at the moment? I noticed that it's still marked "Dangerous" in the kernel configuration.
It is extremely dangerous. Never use unless you are desperate. It creates corrupt files and especially directories. It also cannot delete at all (not implemented). - If you do write you have to run ntfsfix utility on the partition after umount before rebooting into Windows which will let chkdsk run on next reboot which should fix all problems created by the driver. - ntfsfix is part of the Linux-NTFS project. You can download the source/source rpm or pre-compiled rpm from http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/
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This is important to me because it looks like I'll have to start using it next week. My office laptop is going to be "upgraded" from Windows 98 to 2000.
Forget it. Windows 2000 NTFS is supported only read-only. The driver will refuse to mount read-write (unless you are using an out of date kernel in which case it will probably just destroy your partition!). I strongly suggest to use kernel 2.4.4-pre5 at least or a 2.4.x-acXYZ kernel (at least 2.4.2-ac something IIRC) as these kernels contain many important fixes.
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Of course, I hardly ever boot into Windows any more since installing a Linux partition last year. But our corporate email standard forces me to use Lotus Notes, which I run under Wine. The Notes executables and databases are installed on my Windows partition. The upgrade, though, will involve wiping the hard drive, allocating
the whole drive to a single NTFS partition, and reinstalling Notes after installing Windows 2000 . That means bye-bye FAT32 partition and hello NTFS. I can't mount it read-only because I'll still have to update my Notes databases from Linux. So how risky is this?
Simple answer: you can't. 100% data loss is unfortunately guaranteed if you start using it like this, maybe not in one day, maybe not in two but eventually you will try to boot into Windows and find it doesn't exist any more...
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Also, I'll have to recreate my Linux partitions after the upgrade. Does anyone know if FIPS can split a partition safely that was created under Windows 2000/NT? It worked fine for Windows 98, but I'm a little worried about what might happen if I try to use it on an NTFS partition.
It can't. You need to buy Partition Magic or similar utility to do this. There is AFAIK no free NTFS resizer available (yet!).
The best solution for you is to ask really kindly (by them a beer?) to have your laptop installed with one partition which doesn't fill your entire disk (i.e. just ask them to make the partition whatever size you want) and to use the FAT-32 filesystem instead of NTFS. Windows 2000 is quite happy to do both of these. You could even save them the trouble and do the partitioning and formatting for them and just ask them to install Windows 2000 on your C: drive using FAT-32. Then pray they will oblige. Otherwise you will have to spend some money on partition magic I am afraid (or equivalent obviously).
If you go for the repartition yourself approach you should be able to keep your current linux install. You can use GNU parted to resize you Linux partitions so you have enough space for Win2k (find it on ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/).
Hope this helps,
Anton
Signature · 3 lines
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @) Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/ ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/
Quoted 6 lines · Thomas Dodd
Quoted 1 line · [email protected] wrote:
Also, I'll have to recreate my Linux partitions after the
upgrade. Does anyone
Oll you should need is a boot floppy to get back into linux and fix the MBR (rerun lilo?) after the Windows install.
Rerunning lilo is correct fix. But modify your lilo.conf and /etc/fstab to reflect eventual changes in partition names first. - You said that two partitions are getting merged so there might be changes...
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Don't try to write to and NTFS partition from linux. You probably don't want to mount the Win2k version of NTFS in linux either. At one point that could damage the filesystem too.
This is not true. NTFS driver will NEVER write to your file system unless it is mounted read-write. Even if journalling was implemented it still wouldn't write to your fs when mounted read only as long as I have something to say about it! Read only means read only IMO, full stop, end of discussion. - If you have ever seen it write to the disk when mounted read only please let me know as I consider this an extremely serious bug!
Best regards,
Anton
Signature · 3 lines
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @) Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/ ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/
Quoted 4 lines
Where does write support for NTFS stand at the moment? I noticed that it's still marked "Dangerous" in the kernel configuration. This is important to me because it looks like I'll have to start using it next week. My office laptop is going to be "upgraded" from Windows 98 to 2000. Of course, I
Quoted 8 lines
hardly ever boot into Windows any more since installing a Linux partition last year. But our corporate email standard forces me to use Lotus Notes,
which I run under Wine. The Notes executables and databases are installed
on my Windows partition. The upgrade, though, will involve wiping the hard drive, allocating the whole drive to a single NTFS partition, and reinstalling Notes after installing Windows 2000 . That means bye-bye FAT32 partition and hello NTFS. I can't mount it read-only because I'll still have to update my Notes databases from Linux. So how risky is this?
I would not recommend enabling NTFS write support for the moment... Why don't you install Windows 2000 on a FAT32 partition (choose FAT32 during installation)?
It's no problem running Win2k on a FAT32 partition if you don't need NTFS ACLs.
Quoted 5 lines
Also, I'll have to recreate my Linux partitions after the upgrade. Does anyone know if FIPS can split a partition safely that was created under Windows 2000/NT? It worked fine for Windows 98, but I'm a little worried about what might happen if I try to use it on an NTFS partition.
This will not work AFAIK
Quoted 6 lines
I'd appreciate any advice or help anyone can give me. There's just no way I can stand going back to using anything but Linux for my daily work.
Wayne
Regards,
Robert
would somebody be kind enough to explain why writing to the ntfs file system is extremely dangerous, and what are the developers doing to make writing to ntfs filesystem safe?
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[email protected], Open Source + Linux = Freedom
From: "Lee Leahu" <[email protected]>
Quoted 3 lines
would somebody be kind enough to explain why writing to the ntfs file system is extremely dangerous, and what are the developers doing to make writing to ntfs filesystem safe?
My understanding of the situation is that writing to an NTFS volume is not quite 100% guaranteed to destroy the disk directory structure. MS mutates it faster than people can reverse engineer it in a proper "clean" manner. The person who had been working the issue had access to MS information in support of some other products. MS came down on him about supporting NTFS. So he has surrendered such materials as he has rather than continue with the MS product support and is concentrating on Linux. But until his NDA runs out he cannot work on the NTFS code. Other people have picked up the ball. But as noted MS mutates NTFS remarkably rapidly so I'd not look for support for NTFS in the near future.
I have oversimplified the whole issue for which I hope others forgive me. I see no benefit to a rehash of the issue so I am attempting to inject enough information that it will be dropped.
{^_^} Joanne Dow, [email protected]
Quoted 3 lines · Lee Leahu
would somebody be kind enough to explain why writing to the ntfs file system is extremely dangerous, and what are the developers doing to make writing to ntfs filesystem safe?
It's dangerous because NTFS is a proprietary format, and the full rules for updating it (including journals etc) are known only to Microsoft and those that have signed Microsoft NDAs. If you update it incorrectly it gets corrupted and you will lose data. It's certainly possible to reverse-engineer these rules, but very difficult and time-consuming.
-Doug
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The rain man gave me two cures; he said jump right in, The first was Texas medicine--the second was just railroad gin, And like a fool I mixed them, and it strangled up my mind, Now people just get uglier, and I got no sense of time... --Dylan
Quoted 5 lines · you
Quoted 3 lines · Lee Leahu
would somebody be kind enough to explain why writing to the ntfs file system is extremely dangerous, and what are the developers doing to make writing to ntfs filesystem safe?
Quoted 8 lines
It's dangerous because NTFS is a proprietary format, and the full rules for updating it (including journals etc) are known only to Microsoft and those that have signed Microsoft NDAs. If you update it incorrectly it gets corrupted and you will lose data. It's certainly possible to reverse-engineer these rules, but very difficult and time-consuming.
-Doug
my boss rememebres reading a very indepth article in one of the msdn magazines. i could scan the articles in and compress them and send them to the developers. i want to help the ntfs movement on linux. would somebody be willing to teach me the ropes of reverse engineering of software. i am a faster learner, and very interested in reverse engineering of software.
i have access to the msdn library and maganzies and have lot of free time for dedicated ntfs code hacking.
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[email protected], Open Source + Linux = Freedom
Quoted 14 lines · Lee Leahu
Quoted 12 lines · you
Quoted 3 lines · Lee Leahu
would somebody be kind enough to explain why writing to the ntfs file system is extremely dangerous, and what are the developers doing to make writing to ntfs filesystem safe?
It's dangerous because NTFS is a proprietary format, and the full rules for updating it (including journals etc) are known only to Microsoft and those that have signed Microsoft NDAs. If you update it incorrectly it gets corrupted and you will lose data. It's certainly possible to reverse-engineer these rules, but very difficult and time-consuming.
Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 1 line
-Doug
my boss rememebres reading a very indepth article in one of the msdn magazines. i could scan the articles in and compress them and send them to the developers. i want to help the ntfs movement on linux. would somebody be willing to teach me the ropes of reverse engineering of software. i am a faster learner, and very interested in reverse engineering of software.
Copyright interferes with that route, and I'm sure Microsoft would be happy to
enforce that. Links to the msdn.microsoft.com library/kb articles would be good.
Quoted 2 lines
i have access to the msdn library and maganzies and have lot of free time for dedicated ntfs code hacking.
Also good.
Cheers,
Tom
Signature · 1 line
The Daemons lurk and are dumb. -- Emerson
Quoted 14 lines · [email protected] wrote:
Where does write support for NTFS stand at the moment? I noticed that it's still marked "Dangerous" in the kernel configuration. This is important to me because it looks like I'll have to start using it next week. My office laptop is going to be "upgraded" from Windows 98 to 2000. Of course, I hardly ever boot into Windows any more since installing a Linux partition last year. But our corporate email standard forces me to use Lotus Notes, which I run under
Wine. The Notes executables and databases are installed on my Windows
partition. The upgrade, though, will involve wiping the hard drive, allocating the whole drive to a single NTFS partition, and reinstalling Notes after installing Windows 2000 . That means bye-bye FAT32 partition and hello NTFS. I can't mount it read-only because I'll still have to update my Notes databases from Linux. So how risky is this?
Quoted 8 lines
Also, I'll have to recreate my Linux partitions after the upgrade. Does anyone know if FIPS can split a partition safely that was created under Windows 2000/NT? It worked fine for Windows 98, but I'm a little worried about what might happen if I try to use it on an NTFS partition.
I'd appreciate any advice or help anyone can give me. There's just no way I can stand going back to using anything but Linux for my daily work.
Why not just use FAT? Windows2k supports it . . .
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Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data Guess which has occurred. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Patched Micro$oft servers are secure today . . . but tomorrow is another story!
Quoted 4 lines · Lee Leahu
Quoted 1 line · you
Lee Leahu <[email protected]> writes:
my boss rememebres reading a very indepth article in one of the msdn magazines. i could scan the articles in and compress them and send them to the developers.
Since you can access the library for free at msdn.microsoft.com/library that would be a waster of your time. Just give the references to the article. If however you mean the "inside NTFS" and "inside Windows 2000 NTFS" by Mark Russinovich then yes they are great but no they are not in-depth enough in that you have to complete the picture by mapping his "logical" information to the actual "physical" on disk information. Which admittedly is not that difficult with NTFS DiskEdit or any other hex editor most of the time... That's how I got the system files indexing keys and indexed data, the format of $Secure, etc, etc... (-;
I would be surprised if you are referring to any articles I haven't found yet but please try me. (-: I would be happy to have missed out some really cool article which gives even more information.
Quoted 1 line
i want to help the ntfs movement on linux. would somebody be willing to teach me the ropes of reverse engineering of software. i am a faster learner, and very interested in reverse engineering of software.
Do you understand assembly language? If not this is a _very_ long learning curve! Reverse engineering consists of three things:
1. Use a hexeditor or NTFS DiskEdit (provided by MS on NT4SP4 CD) and study the structures on disk and play with files, e.g. compress/uncompress, encrypt/decrypt, apply quotas, apply ACLs, and look at how the disk changes.
2. Use a disassembler (I use IDA Pro from www.datarescue.com/idapro, excellent product btw!) to get at the human readable form of ntfs.sys and associated system files. Fortunately MS provides some debugging symbols on their web site which help a lot as they name some of the functions and global variables so you have some idea of what is going on right away. - This is extremely time consuming. - My current NTFS.sys disassembled file (from WinNT4 ntfs.sys) has 171460 lines! A _lot_ of code...
3. Use a kernel mode debugger (like SoftIce for example) and place break points inside the NTFS driver in memory and then trace execution to see what values are contained in some of the driver's variables, what functions call what, what they do, etc.
Without a working knowledge of assembly language points 2 and 3 are impossible...
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i have access to the msdn library and maganzies
So does everyone. They are free on the net.
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and have lot of free time for dedicated ntfs code hacking.
Now that is cool. (-:
If you are really interested join the linux-ntfs project on Sourceforge. The documentation provided by the header files is the most in depth and most complete docs about NTFS you will ever find... You can use that knowledge to either help linux-ntfs development or just take the knowledge and use it to fix the existing driver instead. I welcome patches! [Make sure to download CVS and not the released version as that is very out of date.]
Anton
Signature · 3 lines
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @) Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/ ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/
Quoted 2 lines · On Fri, 20 Apr 2001 [email protected] wrote:
So how risky is this?
Risky enough. I had to chkdsk once for half an hour after copying on an NTFS 5. Of course, I'm not familiar with the internals of it.
Quoted 4 lines
Also, I'll have to recreate my Linux partitions after the upgrade. Does anyone know if FIPS can split a partition safely that was created under Windows NT?
As far as I know, it doesn't know about NTFS. I might be wrong though. Get some Partition Magic that is bit wiser.
I have installed a Win2000 and you do not have to switch to NTFS. W2000 can be installed on a FAT32 partition. I have installed it on a FAT32 partition and hasn't caused me any problems.
You might wanna give it a try.
good luck,
/me
Quoted 32 lines · On Fri, 20 Apr 2001 [email protected] wrote:
Where does write support for NTFS stand at the moment? I noticed that it's still marked "Dangerous" in the kernel configuration. This is important to me because it looks like I'll have to start using it next week. My office laptop is going to be "upgraded" from Windows 98 to 2000. Of course, I hardly ever boot into Windows any more since installing a Linux partition last year. But our corporate email standard forces me to use Lotus Notes, which I run under
Wine. The Notes executables and databases are installed on my Windows
partition. The upgrade, though, will involve wiping the hard drive, allocating the whole drive to a single NTFS partition, and reinstalling Notes after installing Windows 2000 . That means bye-bye FAT32 partition and hello NTFS. I can't mount it read-only because I'll still have to update my Notes databases from Linux. So how risky is this?Also, I'll have to recreate my Linux partitions after the upgrade. Does anyone know if FIPS can split a partition safely that was created under Windows 2000/NT? It worked fine for Windows 98, but I'm a little worried about what might happen if I try to use it on an NTFS partition.
I'd appreciate any advice or help anyone can give me. There's just no way I can stand going back to using anything but Linux for my daily work.
Wayne
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Hi!
Quoted 4 lines
Where does write support for NTFS stand at the moment? I noticed that it's still marked "Dangerous" in the kernel configuration. This is important to me because it looks like I'll have to start using it next week. My office laptop is going to be "upgraded" from Windows 98 to 2000. Of course, I hardly ever
Quoted 8 lines
boot into Windows any more since installing a Linux partition last year. But our corporate email standard forces me to use Lotus Notes, which I run under
Wine. The Notes executables and databases are installed on my Windows
partition. The upgrade, though, will involve wiping the hard drive, allocating the whole drive to a single NTFS partition, and reinstalling Notes after installing Windows 2000 . That means bye-bye FAT32 partition and hello NTFS. I can't mount it read-only because I'll still have to update my Notes databases from Linux. So how risky is this?
You need to update notes databases. Fine. Why not
cp -a /ntfs/lotus.databases /usr and only ever update them on ext2?
Granted, you will not be able to use lotus notes under w2000. Does it matter?
Pavel
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I'm [email protected]. "In my country we have almost anarchy and I don't care." Panos Katsaloulis describing me w.r.t. patents at [email protected]