NTFS mounting on Red Had Linux 8?

[groovin]

I have a dual boot going RH8 and Win2k. The HD has a few different partitions, a FAT32, NTFS, and what Linux sits on. I tried

mount -t ntfs /dev/hda5 /mnt/ntfs

but came up with an error telling me it doesnt support NTFS. I thought the RH8 kernel had built in support for NTFS... am I correct in thinking this? Also, Im reading that even after some people compiled the kernel, they are limited to read only or else theyll corrupt the data on the drive unless some kind of clean up util is run. Some others say theyve managed to read and write to NTFS after changing the kernel but didnt seem too confident in its write reliabilty.

I guess the best thing to do is format the NTFS partition into FAT32 so Linux can safely write and read from it, but I just wanted to know what your take on this was.

Now supposing I format it FAT32 and mount it to a dir say, /mnt/fat , can I use Samba to share the mounted dir with Windows machines?

I am a linux newbie, in fact this setup here is just a way for me to learn more about it so any suggestions/comments are appreciated.

thanks

 

[Derango]

Red Hat didn't include NTFS mounting, IIRC, due to possible licensing problems (since, technicly, NTFS is a closed MS technology, and the kernel developers didn't actually contact microsoft to get their OK for using it). At least thats what I heard.

Licensing is fun, isn't it? 🙁

And yes...you can use samba to share any directory you want...as long as you can mount it, you can share it.

By the way..NTFS read support is OK (you can get it if you compile a vanilla kernel from www.kernel.org), but write support is NOT GOOD. Since microsoft didn't release the specs of the system, the developers had to hack in support for it. Its a lot easier to read from a file system than it is to write to it, and they haven't quite figured out how to do that 🙂

 

[TonyRic]

RedHat in a long time has not included in their kernel the ability to read NTFS. If you recompile the included kernel you can compile just that module and install it. Then you will be able to read NTFS. BE CAREFUL if you compile read/write, it is still listed as experimental and can cause major problems. For my Win partition, I no longer use NTFS and stick with FAT32.