How safe to use knoppix to write to NTFS

[chip.ling]

Dear all,

I was fighting with one of my Windows XP machine which was infected by a spyware last week.

I worked on the machine for 2 days and nights and got the baster killed with the combination of spybot, HijackThis, knoppix live CD 5.1.1 and windows xp registry editor.

I use knoppix 5.1.1 mainly on inspecting the dll files on the windows directory and did a lot of rename, add new dummy dll files to my NTFS drive.

I also heard a lot in the forum that knoppix is not safe to write to a NTFS drive and may corrupt the NTFS file system.

Just wonder how many of you have really corrupt the NTFS system by using knoppix writes file to it and what knoppix version you are using?

Just want to gather some information here. I so far using Knoppix 5.1.1 heavily to write to my NTFS disk and have no problem at all. (i.e. I use command line all the time)

Rgds,
Chip

[Harry Kuhman]

Chip,

As far as I can tell from following all of the discussions, it is still not safe if used in the normal way one would expect to use it.

There are some people who post that it has worked fine for them. There are others who post about the awful things that happened when they tried (http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28535). Do you feel lucky today?

I said when used in the normal way because there is, reportedly, some alternate driver included on the Knoppix DVD that, in theory, can safely write to NTFS. I sure still would not risk it, seems hard for me to believe that Linux can write safely to NTFS when Microsoft has proven over and over again that they can't. But these drivers are not used by default, and I think there is an issue in using them in a GUI (although that kind of conflict doesn't make much sense, which also worries me). So if you are dead set on doing this, back up all of your data and search the forums to find the secret of using that alternative driver.

[hal8000]

If you install ntfs-3g http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ you need kernel 2.6.20 or higher for stable support.
Having said that knoppix 5.1.1 uses a 2.6.19 and I'm one of those people thats never lost data or had a problem
writing to an NTFS filesystem.

In the past I've lost plenty of data on windows systems using ntfs and fat filesystems, which is one of the main
reasons why I switched to linux.

If you do create, delete, or move files on an NTFS filesystem from the live CD, make sure you wait for the commands
to complete, if youre running from a live cd configure the network and run apt-get install ntfsprogs then you also have access
to ntfsfix and ntfsundelete two very important tools.

Finally, as Harry says it is wise to backup important data should a problem occur. The knoppix 5.3.1 DVD, I belive has
a 2.6.24 kernel so the ealier stability problems should not be a concern, however if the data is very valuable its still prudent
to back it up, windows is quite capable of destroying the data without any help.