Julien Bordet has ported code from NetBSD to support NTFS4 and NTFS5 in OpenBSD-current. He has heavily tested read accesses to his Windows 2000 partition, and that has worked fine. Julien says that there is an existing port, but his port is new and adds NTFS5 support.
NTFS Support for OpenBSD
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Eugenia Loli
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to write to ntfs? or is this just a lost cause?
There is support for that in the Linux version of the NTFS driver in their sourceforge site. But it is really not recommended. NTFS is not FAT. It is an advanced and complex file system and adding write support for it is a very risky thing to do.
Therefore, I am happy with NTFS read-only. I use a plain 5 GB FAT32 partition (that all my OSes pretty much support from well to very well) in order to exchange files between different OSes on the same machine. It is the most safe way to do it via a small FAT32 partition.
You know, NTFS is much more secure while *nix systems can’t write to it. MS knows that you can’t just boot Knoppix and change files on an NTFS volume.
Sure, you can format it, but presumably, an admin could restore a system. But you can’t dual boot and hack the SAM easily.
Yes, I know you can copy files, but that’s not the same as changing the files, booting up, logging in as another user, and authenticating as them….
Now if only someone could resolve the patent issues in the NTFS Linux Code…
Then all distributions could include the read-only access at least by default…
” MS knows that you can’t just boot Knoppix and change files on an NTFS volume.”
” But you can’t dual boot and hack the SAM easily.”
Err yes you can. Ever hear of the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor? I really hope your not an NT admin somewhere. That and you have way too much faith in MS.
When you can walk up to the machine and pop in a floppy or cdrom, NO os is safe.
NTFS would be easy to write to if the specs were available. As a filesystem it is no more advanced than any other modern filesystem in existence. Reverse engineering a filesystem without specs is inherently difficult.
Nothing to add!
Here’s a link to it…
I hope I am not wrong, since I cannot test it here:
http://www.bootdisk.info/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownlo…
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html
-A
From http://www.greyhats.org/openbsd/openbsd.html#ntfs
“Unless you want to test it, it should mainly be used for reading, mounting ntfs read-only. ”
So, I guess that it can write, but you do so at your own risk. I’m happy with read only, but perhaps I should find an old 1 GB drive & test this with data I don’t care about. M. Bordet has asked for testers. If not me (or you), then who?