[Techtalk] Dual-Boot Installation Order?

[Nicole Zimmerman]

Some NTFS stuff, not sure how related to parted issues it would be, but
maybe people would be interested in hearing it.

There are really 2 versions of NTFS: NTFS from NT4, and NTFS from win2k
(supported by NT4 SP5 and higher, IIRC). You might notice that in the
kernel, NTFSv2 has read-only support. This is courtesy MS who will not
release any info about their filesystem, thus it is all "discovered" from
tech documents and hacking.

There is also in win2k a thing called "dynamic disks"... I think this is
only possible with win2k server, but I'm not sure. "Dynamic disks" are
totally un-editable except with the stupid win2k "utilities" (and
apparently some tools I find later in this message).

I checked out parted when I was trying to fix a problem with NTFS
partitions (and later dynamic disks)... it didn't help me at all. I wish I
could use just a plain tom's root boot or something with parted on it
instead of partition magic. Free is good. Free would also encourage my
company to continue our search for happy linux replacements for NT/2k
tools.

As far as parted using NTFS goes, I suspect they would have to do some
hacking to see the relevant information. I found 2 messages on the parted
bug mailing list about it which refer back to the linux-ntfs project, who
are the people above doing the "discovering" and hacking. So it sounds
like it all hinges on that project.

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net

(And hey... they have dynamic disk tools! I swear that stuff wasn't there
when I looked before.)

It looks like they have lots of NTFS tools, but they seem more for
managing NTFS partitions (making partitions, fixing partitions, etc) than
editing the partition table.

I checked out the projects linked from their documentation pages, and none
of them really seem to support what I am looking for (obviously parted is
the most promising!).

If we are getting a response from @gnu.org, it would be interesting to
know what the NTFS integration plan is -- what kind of things are needed
from the NTFS project before we can see NTFS in parted, when we can
expect NTFS attempts, which style of NTFS, etc.

-nicole

At 04:38 on Oct 14, Sam Watkins combined all the right letters to say:

> Sounds like people need ntfs support in parted.  How hard would that be?
> Is anyone working on it?
> 
> Sam
>