NTFS write access under Debian lenny

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 09:37:34PM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> I bought an external USB HD today, dumped some unimportant data onto
> the 500GB NTFS volume at work, and brought it home.  My other external
> HDs are one small vfat, and three larger ext3 volumes.  I decided it
> would be nice if I could have one that was NTFS and would work with my
> friend's computers (most of them are still on Windows).  So I just
> plugged it in and typed "mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/comstar/" as root, and
> then mount shows "/dev/sdf1 on /mnt/comstar type ntfs (rw)" -
> unfortunately, it's lying because I can't write to that volume
> although it reads fine.  And honestly, I'm confused about _how_ it's
> mounting it at all because there are at least two and perhaps three
> different NTFS projects.  I don't seem to have NTFS-3G installed, and
> the "fuse" module hasn't been loaded into the kernel so what's Debian
> using?  Captive?  And why can't I write to the volume?  Google
> searches tell me how to fix my problem ... but they all seem to be
> starting from no NTFS access at all so I want to know where I'm
> standing before I start tinkering.  Thanks.

The kernel has had ntfs read support for years.  It only does read since
doing writes to an undocumented and very complex filesystem just isn't a
good idea.

Some of the other projects use the actual driver from windows which of
course has no issue with lack of documentation.

If you want a driver that will work with windows users and linux for
read/write, you use fat32 (mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sdf1).  Linux has no
problem creating that, while windows won't let you if it is over 32GB
because someone at microsoft is an idiot that claims to know better than
their users.  Windows has no problem using the larger fat32 driver since
it is a perfectly valid filesystem.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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