Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 00:40:43 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Lowell Gilbert" <lowell@world.std.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, <sreese@codysbooks.com> Subject: RE: Is Support For Writing to NTFS Planned? Message-ID: <003301c15f83$d94c5f20$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <44ofmtb18f.fsf@lowellg.ne.mediaone.net>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Lowell Gilbert >Sent: Saturday, October 27, 2001 7:35 AM >To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG; sreese@codysbooks.com >Subject: Re: Is Support For Writing to NTFS Planned? > > >sreese@codysbooks.com (Scott Reese) writes: > >> Hi all, I was just wondering if there were any plans to improve the >> driver for mounting NTFS partitions on FreeBSD? I just read the man >> page and it's over 2 years old, so I wondered if maybe nobody was >> working on it. Most of the time I don't need to write anything to the >> partition (just read), but it would be nice. :) >> >> I would also be interested to know why this particular driver is only >> able to achieve read-only status. Are there severe technical hurtles or >> is it simply a lack of time/interest? I found a few things in the >> archives, but there was nothing really concrete in there that I could >> find. > >Nobody seems to be working on it. Ustimenko Semen has been keeping it >working, but as far as I can see there's no active development going on. > >The main trick with features like this is that you're trying to keep up >with a moving target. read-only, at least, can't lose any of your data. > Keep in mind also that there are a number of copyrights by IBM on parts of the NTFS code (just as there are some Microsoft copyrights on parts of the HPFS code used in OS/2) and this is one area that Microsoft only releases programming info on it under NDA. The FreeBSD NTFS driver was entirely reverse-engineered as far as I can tell. While it's possible enough to reverse-engineer a read-only driver where your just looking at the data that someone else wrote out, to actually go into the NTFS filesystem and start mucking around without knowing how it's supposed to work is most likely going to be futile. One other problem, of course, is that even if you know what your doing you still have the problem that NT uses ACL's in NTFS and there's no coorespondence for them in UNIX. If you need to ability to write (like on a dual-boot system) then create a MS-DOS partition and mount that under FreeBSD. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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