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Accessing NTFS drives in Linux

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pulsechild:
Is it possible? Does anyone know of a software that I could use to access the drive?

I'm looking at going 100% Linux and dropping my dual-boot between Win and Lin. I have a drive in my computer with all of my files (music, videos, pictures, etc.) but it is NTFS. It was a stupid move to make by formatting it NTFS but at the time, I needed to move files and Windows won't even let you format HD's as FAT32. I doubt a SAFE converter exists that would put my drive back to FAT32 (or EXT2/3) so that Linux could get to it.

Please help me out. Or be brutally honest and tell me what a dumbass I am for making that drive virtually unaccessable except for in Win.

bedouin:
See this.  I know read access works fine; writing may be a different story, though you don't care about that.  Alternatively you could find a way to access ext2 from Windows, and copy everything from there.  Whatever works.

Calum:
basically, because the specifications for NTFS are private, there's only reverse engineered support under linux for it, this means experimental and unstable. the specifications for several other journaling filesystems are available (reiserfs, 3rd extended and XFS spring to mind) but microsoft have chosen not to add support for these filesystems in windows, meaning an impasse for those trying to copy files from one journaling filesystem to another, if one of them's NTFS.

the product linked to by bedouin seems to me to promise the impossible, transparent access for reading and writing to NTFS filesystems under linux. my opinions about this are as follows: if there were enough information available to make this possible, the wider community of open source developers would have implemented it as a normal GPL piece of software by now, i find it hard to believe that a software company can hire a limited number of developers on a salary and successfully come up with something that a world full of programmers, who are doing it for the love of it, have been unable to do for years.

My advice (and i'm no expert, but this is what i would do): either
a) back everything up onto CDs or DVDs, then wipe the whole drive and repartition properly
or
b) get your machine booted into windows, copy all the stuff from an ntfs partition onto a fat32 one then reboot to linux and copy it all out onto your ext3/reiserfs partition, this second one's less good because you need a fat32 partition, and it also doesn't involve you having any backups in case something goes wrong, which it tends to do if you haven't got any backups.

Orethrius:
So you're going to tell me that I'm not accessing my three NTFS partitions through Slackware right now?  Ingenious, I say.  If not direly incorrect.  Those fellows have done an awful lot to stabilise NTFS-read access, don't write it off so easily.  If other blokes would get off their collective arses and do the same, we'd have stable write access by now.  It's really not so hard to comprehend - once you have stable read access, you've completed precisely 50% of the requisite work for write access, if not more.  All they have to do then is either reverse the kernel module, or attempt to recreate the module from scratch.  Sure it's not simple, but you're writing that off as impossible entirely too soon.  How quickly you forget the progress that had to be made on FAT prior to MS and a number of their former partners deciding to switch to NTFS and dump FAT32 sources into the wild.

Before you go off saying something like that, keep in mind that there's a high degree of probability that bits of NTFS source have been leaked over the past decade, and that somebody somewhere has managed to amalgamate them and find coders competent enough to attempt to decipher the format.  Just because Microsoft says it can't be done, that doesn't make their word law.  ;)

WMD:
You can read NTFS in pretty much all Linux these days.  Except maybe Red Hat.

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