Hi!
This might have been discussed earlier, but I didn't find anything when I did a search, so I'll just be lazy and ask here.
I am dual booting WinXP and Mandrake 10.1 Community and I can easily access the NTFS drive that Windows lies on from Mandrake. However, I canno't write to that drive. I know that the NTFS-support in Linux generally sucks, but is there any way to fix this? It's a little annoying to have to go through emailing or using a USB-memory whenever I need to transfer a document or something like that...
Is it possible to do at all?
Thanks in advance
live well,
\\Jeff

Writing to NTFS is still very problematic in linux. You might consider making a small FAT32 partition to swap/write data.

Writing to NTFS in Linux is still experimental. I actually had Mandrake 7.something working where it could write to NTFS, but to do that I had to specially compile the kernel for it. Since it _is_ experimental you can potentially hose your NTFS system by writing to it, so I haven't really done that since that one experiment. However, there is potentially another way... You didn't say what fs your Linux system is using, but if it is using ext 2 or ext3 you can access it from XP. There is a program that I have been using for quite some time, made by John Newbigin, called explore2fs (http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/) that allows access to ext2 and ext3 from WinXP. Although it can write to the Linux partitions, the software author stresses that that capability is still a work in progress and is dangerous. It won't, however, read ReiserFS. I have used it to copy files from Linux to XP (and before that win2000 and evern WinNT 4) and found it to be quite handy. So you might want to try it out and see if it makes the problem of moving files from Linux to XP easier. (If you are using ReiserFS, you could make a partition on your hard drive that is formatted as ext2 or ext3 to use as your transfer area. Just make it a bit bigger than any file group you would expect to transfer.) Sorry for the

Thanks for your replies. I have used explore2fs a little (my fs is ext3 btw) but stopped using it since my Linux-distro warned me of strange errors in my fs when I booted it. When I stopped using explore2fs, the warnings stopped appearing.
Well, okey, so there really isn't any way to write to NTFS then, I'll just have to wait another year or so...
By the way, does anyone know the status on the work on getting NTFSsupport into Linux is coming?
Thanks for your help!
\\Jeff

The ntfs write support driver is called captive ntfs. Knoppix comes pre-loaded with it. I tried to use it once and it seemed to work ok. Under linux I could read/write files perfectly to ntfs, but when I rebooted into XP all the files I had created under linux were all screwed up in every way imaginable. I had to end up reformatting that partition.