Hands on help: Can I read NFTS partitions with Linux?

Q I dual boot with XP and Linux and I have heard that Linux can read and write to NTFS partitions, but I can’t do it. Can you help?
Matt Sanders

A Here it’s a case of yes and no. There is a kernel driver that will let you read NTFS filesystems without a problem. This is included in all distributions except Red Hat and Fedora.

For these you can download a driver at linux-ntfs.org under the ‘NTFS RPMs’ section. Just mount the device as usual, for example:

‘mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows’.

For writing it’s almost a definite no. The old NTFS driver included in previous 2.4 kernels had some buggy support for writing, but the chances of destroying your filesystem completely were too high to allow it to be recommended for anyone except developers.