[HOWTO] Add NTFS support

[markwolfe Veteran]

RedHat and Fedora don't include NTFS support by default, due to patent issues.

An excellent resource to run an RPM to add this support to the kernel is here:

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net

You will have to pick the proper RPM, and it will depend on which distro version, and exact kernel you are running.

Click on the "NTFS RPMs" link on the left-hand side of the page, and you will be allowed to select from downloads that now appear on the left-hand side again for various distros. Click on the distro version you are using (i.e. RedHat 9 or Fedora 2 for example).

Next two tables will appear. The top one is the one of interest, as this is all of the pre-prepared RPMs to choose from for your distro.

Open up a shell/console/terminal window, and type in uname -r to show your kernel release. This should (and indeed, must) match the exact text that the uname command printed. This will be the only ROW across that we will want to grab our NTFS kernel RPM from.

For most of us poor souls, we will only be concerned with the CPUs under the "Single Processor" section. If you use a dual-CPU setup, then you will know to look under the appropriate column. ;)

Now, our final selection choices are: i386, i586, i686, and athlon. If you are not sure what processor to select, we can use uname -p to show us what to select.

Now, you should be able to download and install the NTFS support you need following the instructions (which also tell you most of the above anyhow). ;)

[georgevella]

doesn't the kernel come with NTFS support natively? i use that and it works find for reading but doesn't allow me to write to. Anyone know a way to write to NTFS partitions? I have about 300GBs of data which are in an NTFS partition, but can't update anything on it unless i jump back to Windows.

[JadeWolf324]

  icebrain said:

doesn't the kernel come with NTFS support natively? i use that and it works find for reading but doesn't allow me to write to. Anyone know a way to write to NTFS partitions? I have about 300GBs of data which are in an NTFS partition, but can't update anything on it unless i jump back to Windows.

i would NOT recomend activating Write support....its very unsafe. but i think its somewhere in the kernel near the read support.

yes it is native in the kernel but this is just a easy to use RPM file that does it all for you, that was the plus.

no going into the kernel or compiling a new one needed. :D

[kjordan2001]

  icebrain said:

doesn't the kernel come with NTFS support natively? i use that and it works find for reading but doesn't allow me to write to. Anyone know a way to write to NTFS partitions? I have about 300GBs of data which are in an NTFS partition, but can't update anything on it unless i jump back to Windows.

You can use captive-ntfs to use the native Windows NTFS files to write to NTFS

[Juts]

Ok, i downloaded and installed the neccessary RPM but since im new and a little slow i still dont know how to acess my ntfs partition.

[markwolfe Veteran]

You will need to create a "mount point" (a directory) to attach your Windows NTFS filesystem to. You can create it inside your /mnt/ directory, as this is a typical location to put these mounted filesystems. You can call it whatever you like, for example: windows_c

Then you will need to issue a mount command to attach the filesystem. Once you have the command working, you can add a line into your /etc/fstab file (the file that handles which filesystems are mounted on boot), so it gets automatically attached at every boot.