The One Thing Linux can not do

[flyer2000]

I just Installed A minniun debian distro on a labtop a few years old.
I love the Distro, I can run Kde and Grome apps on the same interface.
It does everything I could ever possibly I want it to do. It is a great
distro except for a person who has to read and write off a NTFS drive.
Now I know that only windows can read the NTFS file system.
I can not format the drive or make it into linux friendly file system.
I am really disapointed and now must go back to win 98.

Whenever NTFS support occours I will be back in a flash.


I will still be a learning linux user at my home.

I am just dissapointed in how much time I have spent
getting linux running to a point where I want it and finding
out I can just not use.

[aysiu]

It is a great distro except for a person who has to read and write off a NTFS drive. Now I know that only windows can read the NTFS file system. I can not format the drive or make it into linux friendly file system.

Why do you have to write to NTFS? Why can't you format the drive to FAT32?

I have my system set up to tri-boot Windows XP (NTFS), Mepis, and Ubuntu. They all share files (which all three operating systems can read from and write to) on a FAT32 partition.

I noticed your other four posts had nothing to do with NTFS.
Don't you want to ask some questions about this before giving up? Windows 98 sucks (though, not as much as Windows ME, granted).

[a thing]

Or you could be reasonable and use a decent filesystem that you don't need to defrag and really has security There are third party things for reading/writing Linux-compatable filesystems in windows.

[bigtomrodney]

Try using captive-ntfs. You install it and it runs a wizard which will use the native drivers from your windows partition to read/write your drives. It's included in Knoppix, I've only had limited suceess, but I wasn't giving it too much thought tbh.

Guys this was a question on how to read/write ntfs, not a debate on it's merits.

[winter]

there is ntfs write support in the kernel how ever....it can cause problems

[techieMoe]

I thought perhaps I'd offer a little background on why NTFS support is so difficult in Linux with the WikiPedia article on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

The section of interest is here:

Its main drawback is its very limited support by non-Microsoft OSs, since the exact specification is a trade secret of Microsoft.

Good luck though, it can be done.

[sdousley]

correct me if i'm wrong, but i believed that even Win98 couldn't even read NTFS filesystems. Not natively anyway.

[LondoJowo]

correct me if i'm wrong, but i believed that even Win98 couldn't even read NTFS filesystems. Not natively anyway.

You're correct none of the Win9x/ME family can read NTFS natively.

[Cabhan]

Yeah, the Wikipedia article mentions that.

flyer2000, have you considered perhaps removing Debian, creating a FAT partition, then reinstalling Debian on the remaining space? In this manner, you could read from the NTFS and write to the FAT, then go into Windows and copy the written data from the FAT to the NTFS.

Another option (if you wanted), would be to get rid of Windows, format the new space in Linux as FAT32 (to get around the size restriction), and then install Windows on that.

And again, according to Wikipedia:

Windows versions 95, 98, 98SE and ME cannot natively read NTFS filesystems, although third-party utilities do exist for this purpose.

[aysiu]

I've always been under the impression that it's not a good idea to install Linux on FAT32 partitions...