[Techtalk] writing to ntfs?

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Friday 06 February 2004 22:10, Yaroslav Fedevych wrote:
> Rasjid Wilcox wrote:
> > There are two sites to look at:
> >
> > The Linux-NTFS Project (http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/) and
> >
> > Captive (http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/)
>
> I can only say: Linux can deal ~70% well with NTFS 4 partitions to
> write, and will warn you that you should try and check it every time
> you've finished with writing job. Not impressive. In order to gain read
> support for NTFS, there was a hack, since docs that leaked are poor. For
> writing to NTFS, the hacks were even dirtier, IIRC, since it was reverse
> engineering (English: shooting). As NTFS 5 (used in 2k+) contains even
> more "features" which are proprietary and not hacked still -- hence,
> Linux won't allow you to write on that -- just too risky.
>
> The solution is that you should keep a FAT32 partition for shared data...

Yaroslav, unless you can confirm otherwise, I going to assume that your 
comments are directed at the the Linux-NTFS project, which is the well known 
one, and has always(?) stated that write support was experimental.

The Captive project is a *completely* different project, and states that is 
*does* have working write support.  Please don't discourage please from 
looking at both projects, and please don't imply that the Captive project is 
being dishonest unless you have at least some evidence to back up your claim.

I make no representation either way, as I have used neither.  But I do think 
that working NTFS write support is important to Linux.  Therefore since, as 
far as I can tell, the Captive project has have very little exposure[1] I 
think that it is important that people know about it, and test it out.  If it 
really does work as well as claimed, then the good news should be spread, 
damit.  A _prudent_ user might set up a test NTFS partition to write to and 
read from, and test it out for a bit, just to be on the safe side.

On the other hand, if you do know that the Captive NTFS write support is 
substantially buggier than they claim, then please confirm and give a few 
details.

Thanks,

Rasjid.

[1]  I don't know why - politics perhaps, or perhaps the authors don't know 
how to promote the project?

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +11 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net