How to mount NTFS partition?

[Robert Locke]

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 12:25 -0700, Richard Crawford wrote:
> On Thursday 28 April 2005 12:15, Duncan Lithgow wrote:
> > remember to read about the limitations of this. it is not recommended to
> > write to an ntfs partition from linux.
> 
> I've been pondering this.  I wonder if it would be possible to set the NTFS 
> partition as a Samba share, then then mount that share with smbmount.  So in 
> smb.conf, you might have something like:
> 
> [NTFS]
> (share definitions)
> 
> then you could
> 
> mount -t smbfs //localhost/NTFS (options)
> 
> I haven't tried it, but it makes sense to me that this would be possible.

I apologize, but this does not "make sense".  When you run Samba on a
Linux box it allows you to access "across a network" a running Windows
Server, or, in the reverse, pretend to be a Windows Server to Windows
clients.....

The use of Samba on a single machine tends to imply that you are running
two operating systems concurrently (i.e. VMWare Workstation).

The part that you are missing, is how do you create the (share
definitions).  A (share definition) is simply sharing out something from
the existing Linux filesystem hierarchy, so it would need to be first
mounted under Linux, already.  Of course, at that point, since you are
already accessing it from Linux, why share it out and mount it again?

The issue for most is about what you can ultimately "mount".  Given some
of the concerns about NTFS as a filesystem structure, support for it is
not included directly in the kernel that ships from RedHat, hence the
warnings in the earlier email.  Consequently, as was also pointed out
earlier in the thread, you need to get some kernel modules from
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net and once those modules are in place,
it is recommended to only mount the NTFS partition "ro" or read-only
from Linux.  This is why many people will create a FAT-32 partition
under Windows to use as the read-write go-between in a dual-boot
scenario......

HTH,

--Rob