Ok I got tired of windows and reformated my OS hard drive and now just have Linux. My second hard drive has two partitions one that is NTFS and other that is FAT32.
Now I know that you can write to NTFS but it might be a problem. I know that I can reformat NTFS drive but I do not have enough disks for that.
I have a laptop that is windows that I am Samba into my Linux machine. Can I write to NTFS that way? Or do you recommend a different way to do this?

What do you mean not enough disks? just run fdisk or cfdisk to mess with the partitions. Format w/ the filesystem of your choice here are the format commands

mkfs.vfat /dev/hdxx (FAT)
mke2fs /dev/hdxx (ext2)
mke2fs -j /dev/hdxx (ext3)
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdxx (ext3 again)
mkfs.xfs /dev/hdxx (xfs)
mkreiserfs /dev/hdxx (reiser)

Any information going over a network is File system independent, the OS of each machine is responsible for reading and interpreting the FS, not the network client that asks for it. In other words, when any OS requests network information it matters more what network protocal is being used than what file system is being read. If the computer that has the requested data/destination point for data hard drive then that computer's OS has the responsibility of writng or reading from the hard drive. For example Linux can read/write to ext3, windows cannot. If you have an ext3 partition on a windows system it will not be able to put it on the network no matter what computer requested it.

I mean blank dvd or cds to back all that is on the drive

writing to the NTFS drive from a remote computer won't make a difference, it will still be linux which does the actual writing. I think NTFS writing support it only considered safe if you are replacing a file w/ a file of the same size (same number of clusters maybe) maybe w/ the newer kernels this is different? What distro/kernel are you running? You can use a program like qtparted if you have time. I would copy all the data I can to the FAT and Linux drives and then shrink the NTFS partition w/ qtparted and make the FAT bigger and keep doing that till all the data was on FAT.

Yes you can write to an NTFS partition through samba. It is perfectly OK.

Unless I am misunderstanding what samba does (connects windows and linux on networks) then you would still need NTFS write capability on the linux system with the NTFS partition.

You're misunderstanding what samba does. When you connect to an smb share you make a request for something to be changed and it's the native OS that performs all the changes.

hello


well for accesing NTFS partition you would have to compile the kernel and make it to acces the NTFS filesystem


regards

Actually I may have given you some misleading information. To access the second hard drive on your system you can load the ntfs module and mount it but it will only give you read access. That way you can back it up later. To have read access you can only reformat (and lose all data on that partition).

you can alternatively get ntfs rpm's from here http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/index.html

just find the right one for your distro of linux and the right kernel build. then run the rpm using your package installer and then mount in the console.

mount dev/<WINDOWS> <MOUNTLOCATION> -o uid=<USERNAME>

with <WINDOWS> being which hard drive it is (hda1, hda2 etc) <MOUNTLOCATION>being where you want to mount to and <USERNAME> being the username of your default account.

You can also edit /etc/fstab to make this drive mount on boot. This may or may not give you write support, but it saves recompiling the kernel!