Re: Any way to write to an NTFS partition?

From: Rod Smith (rodsmith_at_rodsbooks.com)
Date: 03/02/04 

Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 17:22:40 -0500

On Mon, 01 Mar 2004 15:04:21 -0500, Daniel Ganek wrote:

> Our salesforce uses laptops with Win2000 or XP installed (Dell). We
> currently add RH 7.3 and GRUB to the MBR for demos. IT would be a lot
> happier if we didn't muck with the MBR.

Why the aversion to altering the MBR? It's not clear you really have a
problem, and even if you do, it's not clear that writing to NTFS is a good
solution. Perhaps you've got valid reasons for doing it this way, but to
me it looks like you're trying to either fix something that's not broken
or are looking for a solution that's harder than it needs to be. For
instance, even if you've got valid reasons to not write to the MBR, you
could instead install Linux partly on a primary partition (say, a primary
/boot partition), install GRUB there, and leave your MBR alone (aside from
using FDISK or the like to tell it to boot the Linux primary partition
rather than the Windows partition). Of course, if you don't already have
Linux installed at least partly in a primary partition, this would require
some dynamic repartitioning or reinstallation, which isn't trivial, so it
may not be the best solution, either; but the end result is, IMHO, much
simpler and cleaner than trying to write to NTFS from Linux.

So, if you could elaborate as to why you don't want to put GRUB in the
MBR, it'd help us to provide you with a good solution.

> I'd like to use a script during the kickstart process to copy a file to
> the NTFS partition and add a line to boot.ini. But, RH doesn't support
> NTFS. Anyone know of a way to do this? Is there a 3rd party module I
> can install during kickstart that'll let me mount the NTFS partition and
> write to it?

Somebody else has already pointed you to Captive
(http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/), but you seem to have
dismissed it because there's no RH 7.2 binary available from that site.
There is, though, source code available. If you *REALLY* need to write to
NTFS, you're not likely to find a solution that doesn't involve compiling
source code. (At least, you won't find a safe solution; there may be RPMs
for RH 7.2 of a read/write NTFS kernel module, but that'd be for the old
NTFS driver, which was notoriously dangerous. There's a slim chance you'll
stumble across somebody who's compiled Captive modules for RH 7.2, but
that seems unlikely to me.) 

-- 
Rod Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com
http://www.rodsbooks.com
Author of books on Linux, FreeBSD, and networking

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