Greywolf <greywolf@starwolf.com> writes:

> Thus spake Brian Rose ("BR> ") sometime Today...
> 
> BR> NTFS is the only way to go for drives larger than 40GB. So from
> BR> WindowsXP my only formatting option is NTFS, and I have heard all
> BR> kinds of bad things happen if a unix writes to an NTFS partition.
> 
> Could I humbly inquire to the rest of the world what, precisely,
> is needed to get reliable R/W to an NTFS partition from UNIX-land?

Microsoft to document enough of it so that their fsck-equivalent and
subsequent writes don't chew up a Unix-written filesystem for
breakfast. I believe all of the free NTFS code out there was developed
by reverse-engineering from existing NTFS filesystems, and figuring
out how to read data back out is much easier than figuring out exactly
what data structures have to be updated and what constraints have to
be met to make a valid filesystem.

Consider, by way of analogy, the FFS bitmap for free blocks; you can
completely ignore it for reading, but writing files without updating
it would be Bad.

        - Nathan