NTFS VS Linux Partition

[przemeklach]

Having been reading through forums and tutorial I'm getting the feeling that my whole plan may not be possible. I'm trying to setup an ftp and webserver on my fedora. All the files are located on an NTFS drive and I want to have people on the local windows network be able to read and write to these files as well as people from outside the network.

Is this even possible? Is it better to convert the partition to a linux/fat32 one. I've tried mounting the NTFS partition but it gives me read only access, as well when I try to edit the fstab file to make it mount automatically I am unable because the file is a read only. So the next question is how to I make files not read only? Thanks in advance.

[hafnium]

check this link out for a way to write to ntfs file systems from linux. http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/
however, there is still no gaurantee that it won't eliminate some files. but it seems like ntfs support has come a long way.

you can convert a filesystem from fat to ntfs, but not ntfs to fat. so changing your fs to fat would involve backing up all of your data. however, this approach is much better supported in li nux.

[sarumont]

NTFS write capablilty is sketchy at best in Linux. It is a proprietary, closed source file system. Reverse engineering takes time. My suggestion: convert your filesystem to an open-source fs. Beside the fact that you will be supporting M$ less, ext3 and reiserfs are 10x better than NTFS or FAT.

[przemeklach]

Ok so I'll backup my data and format the ntfs partition to a ext3 partition. Two questions: how do I format? and will I be able to share out files found on this ext3 partition to windows systems on the network and the internet. Thanks.

[kkubasik]

use either the program fdisk or chdisk to format. If you have samba running, then you should have no problem sharing to and from windows.

[przemeklach]

Ok that makes sense, I've done some browsing on google but again unable to find a basic explanation of the commands used with fdisk. Can you please explain exactly what I would type. Better yet, is there a document that lists all the possible terminal commands and their meanings in normal english; I hate to bother people with these easy questions everytime I get stuck because I'm pretty certain I'm going to keep getting stuck for a while yet. Thanks.

[kkubasik]

Actualy, i realised that you dont even need fdisk, the following command (where hda3 is the partition that you are reformating)

mke2fs -j /dev/hda3

this will make etx3 the file system on the drive you specify. you might want to wait and see if someone will verify this post to make sure that i dont trash your filesystem though.

[przemeklach]

Well I did what you suggested except I didn't specify what partition, I just specified the drive because there where several windows partitions on there that I wanted to merge and convert to one ext3 partition. So it did some thinking and gave me some numbers which made no real sense but no errors so I guess it worked. The problem now is how do I see that drive becuase when I click on my computer all I get is files, but not drives. So does the newly formatted HD show up as a hd or is it mounted inside one of the folders.
I got my hands on 'Red Hat Linux 8 Bible' which may help me but I'm tired and going to bed. Maybe someone overnight will give me a reply otherwise I'll have to start reading this abortion of a book tomorrow, thanks for your help.

PS
Even after I read the book it won't make much sense

[kkubasik]

You wont see specific drives in a Unix based system as people are used to with windows. Instead the mountpoints that you set decide were the drive is. If you plan on changing your partition table, then you will need to use fdisk, check out the gentoo handbook (www.gentoo.org) (under 'docs' link) and see if that can help you.

ps you already have a swap and boot partition, so please dont mess with those, just so you know how to use fdisk.

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please be careful, i dont need you wiping your entire OS,...actualy, if your trying to reformat your entire drive.... that might be easier....

[przemeklach]

Well so I went to that website and it has a good explanation of how to go about formatting HD's but as usual I've hit a snag right of the batt. I type:

# fdisk /dev/hda

like they tell me but I get the error message that is found in the subject line of this reply instead of what they say I should get. What am I doing wrong now? Thanks.