What is Captive-NTFS?
 

I can brows my NFTS drives just fine with Mandrake 10 ...

Captive permits you to safely WRITE to the NTFS partitions in Linux.

It works by utilizing Microsoft's own drivers for NTFS, so there are few, if any problems.

THAT IS GREAT! How do i get it working?

The captive web site explains it best.

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

It's REALLY easy to do.

The installer is very smart as well, it will go out and search for drivers in any Windows partition.

Under 10.1 Official, using the provided RPM's for some reason this process hung on my laptop.

I rebooted and ran the installer again and told it to skip the search of my existing Windows XP partition.

When I did this, it connected to Microsoft and downloaded the correct drivers from MS. Very nice.

You do need the LUFS modules installed prior to installing captive.

If you don't already have them or suspect you don't try

urpmi lufs

to get them in place.

Also there is a utility called captive-install-fstab that modifies the /etc/fstab file to use the captive drivers instead of the Linux ones.

Save off your existing /etc/fstab file...

e.g.

cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.sav

then run this utility AFTER installing captive as indicated.

Reboot and you can read and write to the NTFS partitions from Linux.

i installed that but nothing happened, is there a setting i have to change?

Did you UNMOUNT your windows partition?

Then did you type mount -a or cat the /etc/fstab file to see if the captive-acquire-fstab made the proper changes?

Did the installation via captive-aquire-install work?

I didnt try that, i'll check it out when i get home.

I am completely lost.... :scratch:

Nah, just a little bit confused and missing a space or two in your syntax.

First print out the /etc/fstab and post it here so I can have a peek.

Then we'll take it further.

so I did a clean install of 10.1 and unmounter my drive, i installed the captive RPM. here is the file:

Does it work properly now?

I have no idea. I cant open any directorys to get to the mnt Dir. I ushualy open home then hit the up botton but home keeps crashing..... the only way i can see anything is to use nautalas directly

Open a console, and su to root.

Enter the root password when prompted.

type

umount /mnt/win_c
umount /mnt/win_c2
umount /mnt/captive-music
umount /mnt/captive-noname

Disregard any errors about the device not being mounted...

Now edit the /etc/fstab file using whatever editor you know.

At worst use kwrite

e.g.

kwrite /etc/fstab

Delete the following lines

/dev/hde1 /mnt/win_c ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0
/dev/hdf1 /mnt/win_c2 ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0

These are redundant and will only act to screw up captive.

Save the file.

Now type

mount /mnt/captive-music
mount /mnt/captive-noname

Now go to the directory...

cd /mnt/captive

and display it's contents

ls -l

Do you see your NTFS files?

If so captive is working fine.

all i can see now is empty folders, before i could see everything fine.

What happened when you tried to MOUNT the drives AFTER making the indicated changes?

What message did you get?

Also post the output of the "mount" command by itself.

BTW: On my 10.1 system I tried the RPM distribution of captive which was posted.

I had some problems with it so I downloaded the source code.

When I initially tried to compile it, the ./configure command reported that gnome-vfs-modules was missing from my system.

I then

urpmi libgnome-vfs2_2-devel (or something very similiar)

and the ./configure command would run.

I reran it with ./configure --prefix=/usr and it took off.

When done I typed

make

then

make install

Again I ran captive-install-acquire to make sure that it had the windows drivers loaded (it did) and it complained that there were no NTFS partitions around. I clicked FINISH.

I checked my fstab to be sure that the NTFS partitions were correct, then I umounted them

umount /mnt/windows

and then

captive-install-fstab

After doing this I edited /etc/fstab again and commented OUT the /mnt/windows line

I then typed

mount /mnt/captive-system

(BTW: SYSTEM is the name I gave my drive under WINDOWS...)

And off it went without any problems whatsoever.

I've moved gigs of files back and forth with no issues.

When I try to mount ntfs drive it gives me the following error. What does it mean?

Preparing LUFS kernel module... Run /usr/share/lufs/prepmod if problems occur.
Kernel sources /lib/modules/2.6.8-24-default/build do not contain 'include' subdirectory at /usr/bin/captive-lufsd line 194
main::build_gcc('/lib/modules/2.6.8-24-default/build', '2.6.8-24-default', '/var/lib/lufs/lufs.ko') called at /usr/bin/captive-lufsd line 292
main::build('/lib/modules/2.6.8-24-default/build', '2.6.8-24-default', '/var/lib/lufs/lufs.ko') called at /usr/bin/captive-lufsd line 156

I've got SuSE 9.2 btw....

This is a Mandrake forum.

I just thought that the question might be not distribution specific and someone could have an answer...

Ok, it's not quite distro specific... but the specifics of the distro change the answer here.


You are missing the lufs kernel modules.

These are provided in Mandrake on a seperate RPM.

Once installed these will be autoloaded by the attempt to run captive.

This: "run /usr/share/lufs/prepmod "

Is a generic message which assumes you have compiled the captive stuff from source, and is now telling you how to fix the problem...

However it doesn't apply to Mandrake.

So the above doesn't help you much.

Thanks for the response. I've got a feeling that not many use a captive anyway and are happy without ntfs writing. However, it is quite painful to migrate from Windows to Linux without this feature. Actually I was trying to avoid converting my ntfs partitions into fat32, because to do it I would have to move the stuff I keep there somewhere. Well, it's a drag. Since the project is abandoned it is very difficult to find any help on installing and running it.

Support for it is falling by the wayside now that the newer kernels are starting to support NTFS writing.

However I'll wait to the next kernel rev before I trust it...

So I heard and completely agree.