I just sent a patch upstream to the the util-linux maintainers. :-)

hi davesmith! sorry to revive this thread but apparently i am having the almost the same problem. except that i have already followed your post above and still can't write to the ntfs partition. doing an ls -ld i get this:

drwxrwxr-x 1 root root 12288 2007-09-09 16:40 /Shareware

following your advice above i did this to my /etc/fstab:

/dev/hdb2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb3 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda2 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda3 /home reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/hda4 /var ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda1 /Winblows ntfs auto,umask=002,nls=utf8 1 0
/dev/hdb1 /Shareware ntfs auto,umask=002,nls=utf8 1 0
#/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

I hope i gave every information needed to help me help you solve my problem.

The default NTFS module is a read only one. The NTFS file structure isn't considered well understood enough to put it into a kernel module, well the default one anyway.

If you're wanting write support, I've used a different module http://www.ntfs-3g.org/. Take a look at this one. You may need to install the FUSE package first.

This driver works differently than the one in the kernel. It uses FUSE, which enables all the NTFS stuff to take place in a program, and not in the kernel. This means more checks can be done, or something. Anyway, I've used this one successfully too.

I have used ntfs-3g before my switch to 12 and it was quite successful. However, lately i have trouble using ntfs-3g since the latest package that i got from linuxpackages.net looks for libfuse.so.2 or something like that. if i remember it right, the default libfuse for slack 12 is 2.6.3 or higher.

thanks davesmith! i just installed the latest version of fuse and ntfs-3g and everything went through like a breeze.