How to mount a read write NTFS partition
 

Hi. I'm about to install Zenwalk 2.0.1. The problem I always have with Linux that makes me revert to Windows is my second hard drive. In addition to the 37 GB hard drive that Zenwalk will be installed onto, I also have an 80 GB drive that houses my music and movies which is about 80% full. This drive is in NTFS format and I do not want to reformat because that would mean backing up a crapload of files. I have little experience with modifying the fstab file, but I know it must be done. I can usually get it to READ the partition, but it never allows me to WRITE to the partition. Also, it usually sets the ownership of the entire drive to Root, so I have to log in as Root to view the contents of the drive (which is not convenient).

Could someone show me an example of an fstab file (or just a line from it) that will allow Linux to Read AND Write to my NTFS partition, and have the ownership NOT restricted to just Root????

Thanks

NFS write support is VERY limited and also dangerous at this time. Having said that, it is possible using a usermode file system (fuse) driver. Instead of repeating the full set of instructions, though, I recommend going here.

There's a way to use windows's own ntfs.sys ntfs driver in linux. Just do a google for "captive ntfs linux" and I'm sure you'll find something. I think someone has now written a free implementation of the driver and kernel files so you don't need to copy them from windows anymore but hey if you're willing to have windows on your machine then I guess you're also willing to use the actual windows drivers.

Hope that helps.

Reading NTFS in Linux is reasonably well supported, but writing from Linux to NTFS should be considered as "experimental" at this point. It may work, but the chances of failure are high - personally, I would not use this for any data that I considered to be even remotely useful or important.

If you need stable read/write Windows/Linux capability, set up a shared FAT32 partition. FAT32 can't support *nix file permissions, but otherwise is supported by both Windows and Linux