Is this even possible?

EDIT: I forgot to say that I am talking about sharing it from a computer running Linux to a computer running XP over a network.

I'm not quite sure what you mean - however - Linux can read NTFS filesystems fine but can't write to them succesfully yet - you can certainly mount NTFS partitions into Linux and read them (just not write succesfully yet)

Here's what I want to do.

Using Linux, I want to share the NTFS partition with Windows XP. After I can access the partition in Windows XP, copy all data from it to a different NTFS partition located inside the XP computer.

Unfortunately, because Linux cant write to NTFS succesfully yet this would be like copying, exclusively XP data from one XP partition to another - you'd be mounting the partition in Linux - reading it fine but unable to write to it succcesfully..........

Linux won't be writing to the NTFS partition, Windows XP will.

I want Windows to recognize the harddrive through the network, then using XP, copy all of it to a different partition.

I'm not sure I understand the situation. Is the situation that you have an ntfs partition containing data on a machine that does not have any windows installed? Couldn't you just take out the hd and plug it into the machine that has windows? Sorry if I'm completely missing the point.

It's not that this computer doesn't have windows, it is that windows won't boot. What I am trying to do is use a combonation of Linux and maybe even DOS to get the data off the harddrive and onto a larger harddrive - namely a 120 BG HD on my sister's Windows XP computer. Now, the problem is, my sister is paranoid and thinks I'll screw it up, so she isn't letting my touch the inside of her computer. Furthermore, I have never tried any hardware-related tasks... ever. So putting the harddrive into her computer physically is a last resort.

have you tried fixing the mbr for the machine where windows doesn't boot? If you have a winXP installation CD, you can do it from the recovery console (I don't know the exact details; i"m sure you can find things on this forum and elsewhere) or you can use a dos disk and do fdisk /mbr from inside dos. Of course, make a boot floppy or have some otehr way of booting linux ready before you do this.

have you tried fixing the mbr for the machine where windows doesn't boot? If you have a winXP installation CD, you can do it from the recovery console (I don't know the exact details; i"m sure you can find things on this forum and elsewhere) or you can use a dos disk and do fdisk /mbr from inside dos. Of course, make a boot floppy or have some otehr way of booting linux ready before you do this.

BTW, if you have a bootloader installed, does win at least appear as an option?

also, you can read from an ntfs partition under linux, so if you have a cd burner, you could do via burning onto cds. might be faster in the end.

When suse 9.0 comes out you should have no problems doing this considering its new ntfs support features.

Partition Magic has screwed up the Windows partition (although the data can still be read from Linux). It gives an error 46: Seek Error in the DOS version of Partition Magic. I tried doing a CHKDSK in DOS, but DOS 5.0 will not recognize the C:\ drive, so that was a no go.

should be no problem at all, just setup the mount to have read access by the user or nobody, setup the samba share. Then copy the files over with network neighborhood if that's what you are doing. I would prefer to use ftp myself though.

/etc/fstab
you can add users you want to access it to the group ntusers, create the group then add users.

Easiest way (I think ) would be to create a FAT partition under Linux (which can read and write those), copy the data there (perhaps loosing some finer details of the ntfs permissions) and read them from there under XP.

yeah, sure it's possible, try setting up samba to share the volume, or better yet, ftpd and tne just copy