I have just upgraded my PC and installed the operating systems, I have set it up to dual boot with Windows XP and Suse Linux 8.1. Suse has setup the windows drive on /dev/sda1 and given it a mountpoint of windows/C. I can read the files and directories on this drive but I cannot write to them. Looking at the permissions I can see there are only read permissions. I have tried everything I can think of to try and change the permissions on the drive. I have tried unmounting and mounting the drive using -t ntfs. Nothing is allowing me to change the permissions.

Please could someone advise me if it is possible to edit files and directories on an ntfs partition from Linux? and if so how?

Hi Claire,

and welcome to LQ!

It's NOT RECOMMENDED to enable the kernels
NTFS write support, it's still experimental. I don't think
that SuSE 8.1 would have the captiventfs drivers (a
project independent of the kernel) pre-installed, and
I'm not sure how trivial it is to get it into that versions
of SuSE. But generally: yes, it IS possible to write to
NTFS.


Cheers,
Tink

I wouldn't trust doing it with a 2.4 kernel. The writing may render your Windows unbootable. If you install a 2.6 kernel (and why wouldn't you want to! ), you can write to NTFS, but you may still have to go through a "chkdsk" every time you boot Windows after that.