XP and Linux

[John Wildberger]

Hi Stan,
Here is my inquiry to TLUG:

I have XP and Linux (Mdk10) on my IBM ThinkPad. I can mount  the XP drives on
Linux and read the files. The XP is configured to share the files on the
network. The /etc/fstab is set for the XPdriveC as rw.
Is there a way to write files from Linux to XP ? From all the experimenting I
did so far I concluded that it cannot be done. Am I wrong??
John

I got numerous replies, all telling me that the problem is not with the XP but 
with Linux. The kernel deliberately sets as default to make NTFS readonly. By 
recompiling the kernel with NTFS write enabled I can accomplish what I 
wanted. However, warnings abound that this is a very dangerous practice and 
unless I want to live dangerously I should avoid it.
A better way would be to create a FAT32 partition as part of the XP operating 
system. Such a partition can be written to from Linux.
I proceeded with this and got me into serious trouble. 
The first thing I did was to resize my main partition to free up one gig . 
Then I assigned a FAT32 to this newly created partition. It assigned the 
drive letter 'E' to it. My original setup had four primary partitions of 
which one was used as an extended partition for my various Linux parts.
These parts were assigned to hda5,6,7, and 8.
Because there can only be four primary partitions on a system it assigned my 
newly created FAT32 partition as a logical partition as part of the extended 
partition with the first assignment as hda5. This pushed all my Linux 
partions up one notch. Needless to say this nixed my Linux installation.
To correct this I eliminated first the primary partition that was at the end 
of the disk and had only 8Mb of storage. This was just a leftover from the 
original factory install of XP.
Next I converted the FAT32 locical partition to a primary partition. This 
automatically reassigned the original hda5 to 8 to my Linux system again and 
all was hunky dory.
Now I have a drive E that can be mounted as /dev/hda4 and this permits me to 
send files to XP .  I also made the appropriate addition to /etc/fstab.
Pretty neat, don't you agree ???
John 
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