| Linux and NTFS -- peace at last? |
Sep. 08, 2005
Ever since Samba came along, it's never been too much trouble getting information from Windows machines to Linux systems.
You just mounted the Windows file system with SMB (server message block) as a network drive, and you could read and write to the Windows NTFS (New Technology File System) disk volumes as easily as you could to the older FAT (File Allocation Table) systems.
Of course, this presumed that the files you wanted to get your hands on were on a network drive. If they were hidden away on an NTFS local drive or PC drive that wasn't part of an NT-style domain or AD (Active Directory) forest, things then got more tricky.
Usually a lot more tricky.
Reading from NTFS file systems wasn't too much trouble. Writing to a file or creating a new file, though, was something else again. And, trying to adjust the size of an NTFS partition or recover a dead file was, while not impossible, hard enough that few people wanted to try it.
Now, however, Paragon Software Group has created its own NTFS driver: NTFS for Linux. And, from what my friends over at PC Magazine Labs can tell, it works pretty darn well.
Yet, it's a tool that only the tech-savvy should touch. For starters, it seems to do a mighty fine job of getting around NTFS's security.
Nevertheless, if you want to use Linux as a disaster recovery tool, it's a great edition for your emergency boot and repair CD.
That was the good news. The bad news is that at $70, only people who make a living from bringing back Windows PCs from their death beds are likely to be carrying it.
There are other ways to get at NTFS from Linux, of course.
The most reliable, in my experience, is Jan Kratochvil's Captive. This is the one I use on my "bring 'em back alive" Linux-based repair discs.
Captive, however, uses Windows' own ntfs.sys file for its compatibility. It works, but it's always made me a little twitchy to use Microsoft's own driver. Captive is also a bit on the slow side.
Still, when all is said and done, I've always been able to trust Captive to give me full read-and-write access to NTFS drives. Just be sure to unmount any NTFS drives before you shut down your Linux system. If you don't, well, let's just say, bad -- really bad -- things can happen.
Heck, it's not like I really needed to get anything off that file system ever afterwards anyway!
There also have been several efforts to reverse-engineer NTFS. Perhaps the most successful of these efforts has been the Linux-NTFS Project.
This one has gotten to the point where I'd almost consider using it in place of Captive … almost. I've been able to get it to work successfully with all three major versions of NTFS -- 1.2 aka 4 for NT; 3.0, aka 5, for Windows 2000; and 3.1, aka 5.1, which is used in XP and Server 2003. But it's not been easy.
If you want to use the Linux-NTFS software, be ready to sit down and spend a long time digging through the site's FAQs, documentation, and mailing list archives. It's not pretty.
That said, if you do know what you're doing, the latest version -- 1.11.2 as of Aug. 8, 2005 -- is the one for you.
If you don't know file system 101, however, and you're not sure what "mount(8)" means, you're better off with Captive, or with paying Paragon the money for NTFS for Linux.
There is one good thing about all this: we are moving slowly closer toward getting NTFS tamed for Linux use.
And, since Microsoft itself is having trouble getting its own next-generation file system -- WinFS -- in order and it's still not scheduled to appear in Vista, aka Longhorn, we'll probably have NTFS nailed down before we ever have to worry about getting WinFS to cooperate.
--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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