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Date:      Sat, 02 Jan 1999 13:28:27 +0000
From:      Mark Ovens <marko@uk.radan.com>
To:        chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-uk-users <freebsd-users@freebsd-uk.eu.org>
Subject:   Accessing NTFS partitions
Message-ID:  <368E1EFB.918A2BF7@uk.radan.com>

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Hi,

Although this is not a question, I've CC:'d this to -questions because
of it's technical nature and because there are a lot of questions asked
here about running FreeBSD and Win* on the same box so people may find
it useful.

Hidden away on freebsd.org there is a link to a Russian University
website (http://iclub.nsu.ru/~semen/ntfs/ntfs.html) which has an NTFS
driver for FreeBSD. The latest version (ntfs-releng22-0.9beta.tgz)
works for 2.2.x and 3.x.

I thought I'd let you know that I've d/l'd and installed this and it
works superbly, I can now see my NTFS drive :-), which is useful as I
have a habit of d/l stuff or saving Web pages relating to FreeBSD when
I'm in NT and forgetting to save them to a FAT partition, so when I boot
FreeBSD I can't find them.

There are a few points to note about using this driver:

You cannot build everything with a single ``make''.

There is very minimal documentation with the code, just a README.

The code needs to be copied manually to the /usr/src/sys tree

There are files for patching malloc.h, mount.h, & vnode.h. This means
that you will need to re-build your kernel (no mods are required to the
config file).

In order to make mount_ntfs the file mntopts.h is required. If you
haven't installed all the sources it can be found in the /src/ssbin.*
archive an the first CD-ROM.

``make install'' for the lkm and the mount_ntfs binary didn't work
properly as it used the ``-c'' option which isn't valid (in the 2.2.8
install anyway, maybe valid with 3.0?) and also doesn't give a dest dir.
You'll need to do it manually.

You may need to make the device nodes for your NTFS partition. Remember
that if it is in a logical drive in an extended partition that the
slices for the extended partition start at 5, i.e. [sw]d0s5.

The driver, whilst working fine, is somewhat inconsistent in it's use of
long and short (8.3) filenames, e.g. ls on my system lists both
``PROGRA~1'' and ``Program Files'' in the (NTFS) root dir. I can ``cd''
to either and the ``pwd'' returns ``/ntfs/Program Files'' in both cases.
As best I can work out this appears to only happen when the long name
starts with an upper-case letter.

At the moment the driver is read-only :-(, but the author, Ustimenko
Semen, is planning to develop it to be read/write :-). Don't forget to
mount it read-only (use the ``ro'' option in /etc/fstab).

If you think you need NTFS access I hope the above is of use to you. I
will try and put together a step-by-step FAQ/HowTo over the next few
days.

Enjoy.

-- 
  Trust the computer industry to shorten Year 2000 to Y2K. It
  was this thinking that caused the problem in the first place.

Mark Ovens, CNC Applications Engineer, Radan Computational Ltd
Sheet Metal CAD/CAM Solutions
mailto:marko@uk.radan.com    http://www.radan.com



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