Activating NTFS partitions for r/w in linux and vice versa

[efernandez2]

How do I mount two other partitions in my hard drive so that linux can read and write to it? I also want to know if it works the other way (dumb question I know, but I'll take my chances)?

[Kaste]

Well you plain can't

There is no reliable driver for write access to an NTFS partition. You can try your luck but i wouldn't.

What do you mean the other way round? If you mean access Ext or Reiser partitions from Windows, Yes that's possible. I find ext more comfortable because there is an implementation as a filesystem service whereas Reiser I only found one that acts as a user program which is akward.

[Gusar]

Of course there are reliable ways of writing to ntfs. You can either use captive or ntfs-fuse.

Captive uses the original windows dll so it's 100% compatible but is slow. I don't use it, so I don't know how to set it up.

ntfs-fuse works great for me, with the exception that somethimes I can't delete a file, but changing files, creating new files and most of the time even deleting works. You can install it by emergeing ntfsprogs with the fuse USE flag, then modprobe the fuse module and set up /etc/fstab as described here in the ntfsprogs documentation. It's perfectly safe, but if you're paranoid, go for captive.



For the other way around, if you use ext3, you can either use ext2fsd or ext2ifs. Both can write to ext3, but they don't update the journal, meaning they mount the partition as ext2. But I haven't encountered any problems yet.

[Kaste]

Well i didn't know about captive, I guess that's safe. I have made rather bad experience with Fuse and that old russian driver.

I can recommend ext2ifs it's great and yeah unless your computer crashes you are perfectly safe without journalling. In case that happens run linux first and it is safe again.

[Gentree]