linux ntfs support Options

[*kryogenix*]

Are there any distros that can read NTFS formatted partitions? I'm planning on dual booting between windows and linux now that I have my computer built, and I want both OSes to be able to access the one big partition. This is how I have my partitions set up if that helps:

C:\ - System Primary drive (20 gb) <--- the partition that I currently have windows on
D:\ - Logical Unformatted (4 gb) <--- the partition that I plan on installing linux to
E:\ - Logical Unformatted <--- (125 gb) <--- the data partition that I want both OSes to be able to access.

So, yeah, if anyone with experience in this stuff *cough*mipadi*cough* could help me out, that would be great, mmmmkay?

[*mipadi*]

NTFS support is built into the Linux kernel. There are, however, some glitches. For example, NTFS support is not loaded immediately upon startup, which of course means that the Linux kernel and the bootloader cannot reside on an NTFS partition, because the Linux kernel cannot read NTFS volumes upon startup.

Basically, once you get the computer booted, you should be able to mount an NTFS partition just like any other drive. However, you cannot write to an NTFS partition without other extensions--you can only read them. This is fine as long as you only want to access files that are on an NTFS partition, and not write them. (There are extensions that allow you to write to NTFS partitions from Linux, but they are highly experimental right now, which means that they often times cause more problems than they are worth.)

As far as specific distros, I think most new distros should be able to handle NTFS partitions. NTFS support has been present since kernel v2.2; v2.6 features some write support, but it is sketchy, as noted above. So as long as the distro has at least v2.2 of the Linux kernel, it should be able to handle NTFS volumes.

(The problem with all this, of course, is that Microsoft guards the specs for NTFS very closely, so everything must be reverse-engineered. But that's fodder for another discussion. )