Help with Knoppix, flash drive, and NTFS

[12345Michael54321]

First, my apologies, in that I'm sure some of what I'm about to ask has already been answered in various other places. But I'm new to Linux and am still in that awkward "bringing myself up to speed" phase.

Okay, here's the situation - I've been using Windows for a long time. Currently, I use Windows XP SP2, on both of my computers. All of my hard drives are formatted as NTFS.

Recently, I tried a Knoppix DVD, version 5.0.1. I've also tried out a few other live Linux CD and DVD distributions. I'm fairly impressed.

I own a few USB flash drives. You know, those little things smaller than a stick of gum, which can be plugged into a computer's USB port, to function sort of like removable hard drives.

Question 1 - Could you direct me to a set of step-by-step instructions which even a newbie could easily follow, for installing Knoppix onto a 1 gig USB flash drive, such that I'd be able to plug the flash drive into one of the USB ports on my computer, reboot, and have the computer run Knoppix (just as if I were booting off a live CD or DVD version of Knoppix)?

Question 2 - As mentioned, the OS upon which I rely is Windows XP SP2, and my hard drives are NTFS. It's the NTFS part that I think may cause problems, as I'm led to believe that Linux and NTFS don't get along all that well. (Yes, yes, I agree that it's all Microsoft's fault, and Microsoft is evil. But frankly, I'm more interested in finding solutions, than in assigning blame. And for a number of reasons, I absolutely cannot completely abandon Windows.)

So, let's say I'm visiting my mom for the weekend. While at her house, I stick the flash drive with Knoppix on it into the computer there, write a letter via OpenOffice's word processor, put together a small spreadsheet, and edit a picture taken with my digital camera. I save the resulting letter, spreadsheet, and picture, to a directory on the flash drive.

Then I go home and want to copy this work to the hard drive in my desktop computer.

Can I simply stick the flash drive into my desktop computer's USB port and copy the aforementioned files to my NTFS hard drive, with no problems?

If not, is there some other flavor of Linux that will let me do this? Or some simple, reliable, and safe work around?

Or do I fundamentally misunderstand the nature of Linux's alleged NTFS write problems?

Again, I'm sorry if all this has been gone over a hundred times before. I'm really trying to learn what I must about Linux, but there's a lot of information out there.
--
Michael

[Harry Kuhman]

Welcome.

You likely expected to get simple clean informative answers. Sorry.

I have found that many computers that claim to be able to boot from USB can't really do it, Including my HP notebook. Even trying to boot the old hard drive moved to a USB2 external case fails. Flash drives can be more of a problem because their geometery can vary somewhat from hard drives that the BIOS should boot. Some systems do boot these well, but others do not. I would suggest that you use the search feature on this site to try to find a fairly recent (last mionth or two) post on putting Knoppix on a flash drive, I think it was in the booting section. also I would suggest that you look at DSL (Damn Small Linux) which includes's it's own uitility to partition the flash device and make it bootable and install the Knoppix based DSL on the drive. Even if you decide that DSL isn't right as your final system, this would be a good way to start and affirm that your hardware can boot the device.

See answer #6 for discussion on the NTFS issue. The simplest answer for the case you outlined would be to read the data off a FAT partition on the flash drive from Windows, not after booting back into Linux. That way you can write to NTFS safely (as safe as NTFS writing is under Windows, I've had 3 drives completely roached in 3 years, never write to NTYFS from Linux, and from what I see from other users on this forum that may be typical).

[Jacky]

I respect Harry's tendency to be conservative, after all he has hosed 3 disks in 3 years.

However I have personal, recent and frequent experience of writing to NTFS with Knoppix, using the latest tools from the Linux-NTFS project (see: http://www.linux-ntfs.org/ and particularly the references to ntfs-3g, which is the latest tool). Note that this is not included with Knoppix and you have to install it yourself.

I have posted some of my results of testing ntfs-3g on this forum. What I can say from my experiments and stress-testing of Linux writing to NTFS is that significant progress has been made in the last few months, but I consider it a bleeding edge experimental capability. I have not encountered major problems, and neither have the many others who have been testing ntfs-3g. But that does not mean problems won't arise. There are risks and unknown unknowns, so only do it if you are keen to be part of the community of users willing to experiment and take risks in order to help the Linux-NTFS developers push the frontiers.

Having said all that, I must also say that, given the description of your usage scenario (copying a few files back and forth), Harry's advice and suggested method is correct and the best one for your needs. There's no need to add additional risks and complexities to these simple tasks.

If however you are still interested in experimenting and testing with NTFS, let me know and I'll give you more details.