MOUNTING NTFS PARTITIONS IN LINUX

Who wants to take a swing at the champ? The aggressor swings left, he ducks, misses! Another blow evaded, and another! Linux is unbeatable!! But wait! Here comes the killer blow! Linux cannot move fast enough to avoid it! Mounting NTFS partitions in read-write mode. It connects well and Linux falls to the floor and the ref. begins the countdown. 10... 9... 8...

As yet, there is no Linux proper way of mounting NTFS partitions in Linux in a read-write mode, the reasons this has not yet been taken care of is “I dunno” maybe it's all a great conspiracy, who cares. All I cared about was that I has to back up a guy's documents (winXP OS) and ALL I had available at the time was a PC running mandrake 10.1

To my horror, I found out that Linux could MOUNT the drive but not WRITE to it... with deadline fast approaching, I needed a way out FAST (quick, quick, like a stick, stick, I should really not take up hip-hop) So after some google searching  I found out that there are some tools out there that help mount NTFS partitions in read-write mode under Linux. A few of them by the looks of it. I chose the one that caught my eye, a certain captive ntfs by Jan Kratochvil. You can find it here: http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive. Despite the numerous warnings about this program being based on reverse engineering techniques, and being experimental and potential permanent damage to the hard drive bla, bla, bla I downloaded it anyway, so you have been warned, only play with this tool if you do not hold your life in high regard. I got hold of the source files even though there were numerous RPM's available. after ungzipping the files, I found that there was no need for a ./make && ./make install section, there is just a ./install and an ./uninstall script in the folder. (pretty self explanatory I hope)

So you run ./install in a prompt and after the install is complete, it warns you about it having to scan for files or whatever using the 'captive-install-acquire' option this is to get some microsoft .exe's and .sys files. Namely cdfs.sys, ext2fsd.sys, fastfat.sys, ntfs.sys, and ntoskrnl.exe, right off the bat, my mandrake installation provided for the first 3 files, so all I needed was ntfs.sys and ntoskrnl.exe, and this the program can find the files FOR you (you lazy bastard) so this I rate is a SERIOUSLY cool option. If the program finds nothing, you can also specify file location, fortunately for me I had the user's drive that needed to be backed up plugged in and mounted, so it had a good scour through that and pulled the necessary files. This is done on a very user friendly gui that pop's up right after you type in the captive-install-acquire option. there is even an option that lets you download the files from the net (of course you have to promise you're legal and that you CAN download these files because you are a good boy).

So after all that you are ready to mount your drives!! you can do this by using this mount command:
mount -t captive-ntfs (your device here eg. /dev/hda1) (your mount here eg. /mnt/drive_c)
...and off you go. It's pretty simple.

And now a word of warning.. this software REALLY is very experimental... during my days of playing with the stuff, I found out that after a while, your OS really will corrupt and die if you play with it too much. THIS TYPE OF WRITING IS DANGEROUS but I will keep you all informed because this is a SERIOUSLY cool thing to do in linux, and I would rather get caught with SOME CLOTHES ON than NONE AT ALL, so I say as soon as this prog sorts itself out, Linux will have taken a big swing at Micro$oft.

Ding! And the winner by T.K.O. is...