Persistent home from NTFS works in Knoppix 3.8.1

[eco2geek]

Klaus Knopper and Co. included the capability to both create and mount (read-write) a persistent home from NTFS in Knoppix 3.8.1. (It works with Unionfs.)

To create it (assuming your NTFS partition is the "C" drive, aka "hda1"):

- In the \KNOPPIX directory on the CD, there's a GUI utility named "MkImage-ct.exe". It's in German, but easy to understand. Run it in Windows and select the partition you want to create the persistent home on, and use the slider to choose a size. Click the button to create an empty persistent home file ("C:\knoppix.img").
- Run Knoppix from the CD (without a persistent home, if you've already got one on another partition). In KDE, select "Configure > Create a persistent KNOPPIX disk image" from the "Knoppix" menu (the penguin button on the Kicker bar) and follow the prompts. Select your NTFS partition. Knoppix will give you several dire warnings; click "OK". Knoppix will find your "knoppix.img" image, format it, and copy data to it. You must reboot.

To use it:

- Restart Knoppix. At the "boot:" prompt, enter "knoppix home=/mnt/hda1/KNOPPIX.IMG" (it seems to be case-sensitive) and follow the prompts when it mounts your persistent home. (Be sure to check off all the options [using the spacebar] and choose "OK" if you wish to save to your new persistent home.)

Notes:
- There's lots of you out there who know more about Knoppix and Linux than me. Please add your corrections/clarifications.
- To harryc: This capability probably existed in 3.8 CeBit; I just didn't think to look for it.
- Can this be used in conjunction with the ISO on the same NTFS partition?

[morrisonpeter]

I have a limited user account on my XP NTFS drive (on a laptop, second HD is out of the question,) so I can not write anything to the root of NTFS, except for new folders... This program doens't seem to let you create an image anywhere but root, so it hasn't worked for me. Does anyone know of a workaround? I am stuck using a flash-drive at the moment, but it sucks having to use that, would like to be able to us the internal HD... wish I could partition it with my limited account...

[malaire]

I have a limited user account on my XP NTFS drive (on a laptop, second HD is out of the question,) so I can not write anything to the root of NTFS, except for new folders... This program doens't seem to let you create an image anywhere but root, so it hasn't worked for me. Does anyone know of a workaround? I am stuck using a flash-drive at the moment, but it sucks having to use that, would like to be able to us the internal HD... wish I could partition it with my limited account...

If you want to partition it, you could try http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php which is 30MB LiveCD for easy partitioning.
ps. I havn't really tested that yet, so use at your own risk.

[dvryknopper]

I have a question for Harry Kuhman regaurding this thread. You know how you often mention writing to NTFS from linux creates a real risk of of corrupting the NTFS partition, would that risk still be a worry using the method eco2geek described, since it uses a Windows application to set things up, eco2geek's suggestion sounds great to me, but I don't want to do it if the NTFS "no-no" rule for linux would still be valid for this situation.

[Harry Kuhman]

I have a question for Harry Kuhman regaurding this thread. You know how you often mention writing to NTFS from linux creates a real risk of of corrupting the NTFS partition, would that risk still be a worry using the method eco2geek described, since it uses a Windows application to set things up, ....

I saw the post but have never done this. It still seems extremely dangerous to me. After all, unionfs is a RAM based file system that merges in a disk (or CD or DVD) based file system and presents the combination as if it was one file system. I don't see how this in any way gets us past the effort that Microsoft seems to be putting into making sure that NTFS can't be written to safely by Linux. And lets not miss the important line in eco2geek's post:

... Knoppix will give you several dire warnings;....

That said, eco2geek is pretty knowledgable. But it is not clear to me though from his post just how much he has used this. Personally, my only NTFS partition is too important to me to risk this. I backed up that partition long ago and then shrunk it and put a FAT partition in the recovered space that both Knoppix and XP can use to share files and Knoppix has a safe place to write any files. So I'll not likely ever use it. If you decide to I urge you to always have very good backups.