Excellent results with safely reading and writing NTFS may be had by using the credit-card sized live (iso) CD from INSERT, in Engish and German. See http://www.insert.cd/ and download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/insert/ . Strong medicine, credit-card bootable live CD, Knoppix-based, and works with just about every available file system, including MSDOS FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, and the full range of linux journaling file systems. Very nice tiny bootable CD with a usable desktop besides.