How do you mount and read ntfs partitions?

[garyng]

[quote="Thaidog"]

With Samba you can mount NTFS volumes and read and write to them, but remember, it's the actual Windows computer that's still handling the low-level hard drive access. Samba's just "telling it what to do."

(End of half-assed guess. )

Well what if you have a linux box acting as a samba server? (Am I going to get shot if I dig too deep here? ) It still makes no sense to me...

Samba on linux still relies on underlying fs to access NTFS and currently only read-only unless you use capture. eco2geek's referred to using the smbfs which would mount a remote server that is running Windows that can read/write NTFS.

[Thaidog]

Hey all I know is I've got a Mac OS X box (2 actually) that use smb to share files... it's filesystem is HFS+... but the OS itself can mount FAT32 and NTFS locally and read and write to both locally. Also, I'm pretty sure I can take those disks and make them SMB shares as well. HFS+ shares under samba can be read and written to.

Now it's obvious to me that samba is nothing more than a protocol that is used by windows to xfer files over a network... and Linux can use this protocol to share local disks with XFS or whatever filesystem with read write privileges. (I don't know if you can share local ntfs shares on the box via smb...?)

The thing is that UNIX seems at least to me to treat local and remote filesystems pretty much the same... There's got to be some rather easy way to trick it in to thinking a local disk is a remote disk and use the smb protocal to access r/w priv's. It might not be the fastest way to access the files but it at least seems possible.

What I don't know is if there is some kind of "hooks" that have to be developed for the underlying filesystem to support the samba protocol. Which to me seems the only possible hangup.

[garyng]

you don't need hook of any sort as far as samba goes. Samba is just another program running on linux and can read/write all mounted fs, limited by what the underlying fs driver can do.

This is the same for XP, or Mac or whichever as far as I know.

Now it is possible on linux to not interpret the NTFS partition but treat it as just a block device and shared it over the network(but not SMB though). Unfortunately, I don't know a Window programs that can do this over the network. So the bottom line still comes down to, if the NTFS partition is on a machine running linux, there is NO WAY to write to it safely except the captive project. Samba doesn't help here.

[OErjan]

just as i thought, windows must run on the machine where ntfs is being written to.