Re: Cross Platform Directory Access

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• In reply to: Davide Bianchi: "Re: Cross Platform Directory Access"
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Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 15:39:35 +0000 (UTC)

Davide Bianchi wrote:
> Hustler <cabrooks2000@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Sometimes I am able to have read access but I want to be able to write
>>to those partitions
>
>
> You have to enable the write support by hand, and note that writing
> on NTFS can easily destroy the whole partition. So, when it happen,
> don't came here crying.

Just to elaborate on that a bit, here's the way I understand it:

Prior to Windows NT, DOS and Windows used variants of the FAT
filesystem. This was well understood outside MS. It wasn't especially
hard to write the code to read and write to FAT filesystems reliably.

Linux systems can happily read and write to FAT filesystems.

 From Windows NT onwards (NT,2K,XP,...) MS introduced the NTFS
filesystem which supports better security and numerous other desirable
features. There have, however, been several successive versions of NTFS.
These are all proprietary and without public documentation (i.e the
inner details are kept secret by MS).

The Open Source community have not yet worked out *all* the details of
how various versions of NTFS work (and presumably how to cater for any
bugs in all the versions of Windows that use it). For all I know there
may well be patent issues that need to be carefully trodden around.

Hence Linux support for writing to NTFS is incomplete. You can do it but
Windows may perceive the filesystem as damaged.

The best ways to share writeable data between Windows and Linux are
probably
a) FAT32 (dual-boot single PC) and
b) SAMBA (if separate PCs).
Maybe vmware helps with NTFS?

--
Ian Wilson.

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• In reply to: Davide Bianchi: "Re: Cross Platform Directory Access"
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