[vox-tech] Anyone have experience with Windows XP & Linux on a Laptop?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jonathan Stickel (jjstickel@netscape.net):

> NTFS writing is still unstable in Linux.

It is.  There have been two NTFS drivers for the 2.4 kernel series.  The
earlier one could made to enable write support, if you felt lucky, by
editing a switch in the source code and recompiling.  (The requirement
to do source-code editing was intended to signal that you are doing
something risky.) If you do that, you are strongly advised to do NT disk
cleanup (whatever the thing that does that is called) immediately upon
rebooting to NT, as there is a significant risk of filesystem
corruption.

The newer, replacement driver is rewritten from scratch, and is claimed
to be superior to the old one, but so far entirely omits code for
writing data to NTFS.  Write code will be added at a later date.

The Linux-NTFS project (who produce both the drivers and the NTFS-Utils
package, which now has a beta-level ntfsresize utility for Linux) have
been obliged to reverse-engineer NTFS from direct examination and
experimentation, since Microsoft Corporation regards the necessary
technical information as proprietary.

> If you only have a disk image for WinXP (as I did), you indeed will
> have trouble partitioning first and then installing WinXP.  In that
> case you can use the latest version of Partition magic, which now can
> re-partition NTFS and Ext3, along with everything else.

There are also some other options, which I detail here:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/ntfs

-- 
Cheers,
Rick Moen                     Emacs is a decent operating system,
rick@linuxmafia.com           but it still lacks a good text editor.