Hi utu,

I will get to your question but first I have to respond to Harry Kuhman's post (# 6) under
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/threads...h-installation.

Harry is a Sys Admin and I take what Sys Admin's say very seriously. I didn't mean to imply that (I think) accessing Windows partitions from Linux is perfectly safe.

Now ... this is relevant though at first it may not appear so.

My Knoppix 6.4.3 USB installation is less that 4 weeks old. The second bit of software I installed was a plug-in for Eclipse. The plug-in didn't work so I installed it again. This time the plug-in worked fine. Eclipse is like Windows (heck it will even run under Windows): you've a GUI, all you do is point and click and press return when the OK button appears. What could possibly go wrong ?

When I came to remaster I discovered that /UNIONFS/lost+found was not empty. It contained, I believe, files missing from the first installation attempt. So, the file system screwed up.

This was a timely reminder that even accessing Linux file systems under Linux is not perfectly safe.

Anything we do carries some risk. Risk has two halves: the probability of shit happening and how deep the shit is when it does happen.

I am happy using Linux file systems because my experience (going back over many years) is that the probability is low and the consequences not serious. All those years I used Windows 98 I was not happy because experience taught me the probability the file system was damaged after a power cut was quite high and I could loose important files.

I don't know ntfs all that well. When someone whose authority I tend to respect says what Harry said about serious consequences, I think "I'd better not do that again." I don't know and I don't know how Harry knows but I do know that if I start repeating that kind of thing I'm effectively spreading rumour. Just because a rumour gets repeated doesn't make it any more or less true.

Harry wrote that often corruption is not noticed until long after the damage is done. That makes proving cause and effect very difficult. My very first PC gave me lots of file system problems. Until I installed a UPS. I had circumstantial evidence, but no proof, that power brown-outs were the root cause of my problems.

Someone might try statistical analysis to correlate using Linux to access ntfs with later file system problems under Windows but I suspect all they would infer is that inexperienced people tend to make more mistakes than experience people and that reckless people are more likely to wreck things than cautious people.

I can and do approve of Harry reminding people to back up their file systems.

I also approve of this thread. Many people new to Knoppix may see ntfs as their first option when they need some extra disk space. They need to understand a little the risk they may be taking.