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Dear Friends,
Thankyou for your support. When I rightclick and try to modify read/write permissions on harddisk, knoppix said that due to NTFS partition it can't do the risky thing(ie.changing the file system and writing to it). On the other hand it easily writes to FAT partitions.
Because NTFS is an encrypted file system, Knoppix can read it, but cannot safely modify it. There are special cases where Knoppix can write, but they are limited to Exactly replacing a file. This is a general Linux problem because Microsoft would rather not have you read it at all!
Your alternatives are to reinstall XP with Fat32 instead of NTFS, but I've heard that there are drawbacks to that on large drives under 2K and XP [but not 98-ME]. Or, you could get a disk program like Partition Magic to resize the NTFS partition and make some free space into a FAT32 partition which would be readable by both OSes.
Having a partition readable by both OSes is a great feature. Most of the general software available under Knoppix is also available under windows...so you can use OSS even if you need to be in windows!
If you just want to use the NTFS space(say you need space under linux but don't want to repartition), it is quite safe to create one large chunk of file WHILE RUNNING WINDOWS, then loop mount it under linux and create whatever file system on top of it. This is what the previous poster mention of replacing file with the EXACT same size. loop mounting would not change the size and location of the allocated sectors or the directory structure in anyway even though data would be written to it.
If you want to touch files under NTFS in any other way(like copying files while running linux and hopes to retrieve it later under Windows), DON'T. The folks writing the driver still haven't had the NTFS structure fully sorted out and it can corrupt a lot of things.
SuSE just announced that their new release 9.0, due later this month, will sport the newest Linux kernel and include improved NTFS support, along with support for Athlon64.
Not sure how much stock to put in that "improved", but anything they can do to ease the Windows XP transition will be a very smart move. I love NTFS, and the inability of most distros to use it is a major disadvantage of Linux, IMNSHO.