Author Topic: NTFS?  (Read 568 times)

billy_gates

  • Member
  • **
  • Posts: 801
  • Kudos: 0
    • http://www.skinner.com/jeffberg
NTFS?
« on: 23 November 2002, 04:38 »
Is there a way to mount NTFS hard drives in RedHat Linux 8.

P.S. I am such a newb I don't know how to mount any hard drives, so you have to walk me through the process.

voidmain

  • VIP
  • Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 5,605
  • Kudos: 184
    • http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/
NTFS?
« Reply #1 on: 23 November 2002, 04:53 »
This is a FAQ question, but it's not as simple as the FAQ makes it sound. The question should be updated for those distros that do not provide NTFS support in the default kernel build:

http://www.belg88.com/faqman/index.php?op=view&t=6

Now, since that FAQ question will not help you: NTFS support is extremely experimental (in all distributions of Linux). Before you can mount an NTFS partition in RedHat you have to reconfigure your kernel and compile in NTFS support (read-only would be strongly recommended). After you install the new kernel you should be able to mount your NTFS partitions read-only. If at all possible it would be recommended that you convert your NTFS partitions to FAT32 (not supported in NT) or FAT16 (limited drive size). I realize that you may need NTFS for security reasons and converting to FAT can be a pain. But FAT/FAT32 support works very well in Linux, NTFS does not.

The poor NTFS support is certainly not the fault of Linux. Microsoft does not publish the NTFS file system structure (this is normal procedure with Microsoft). Because of this there is a lot of "guess" work in the NTFS driver. If you compile in write support they say you most likely will destroy your NTFS partition if you use it.

[ November 22, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

Someone please remove this account. Thanks...

rtgwbmsr

  • VIP
  • Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 1,257
  • Kudos: 0
    • http://www.akgames.net
NTFS?
« Reply #2 on: 23 November 2002, 05:11 »
Thanks for the info. I also linked to the recompiling FAQ question in there for the obvious reason.
http://glezhe.phpwebhosting.com/faqman/index.php?op=view&t=6