http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ is supposedly stable, BUT if you don't have a good backup plan for your data, you should stick with fat32 as ndarko suggested.
Main Topics
Browse All TopicsMy laptop is running on Linux (Mandriva) and XP. The 100Gb disk is partitioned as follow: 20Gb for XP ("C"), 25 Gb formated with XP (NTFS, "D") where I intent to locate all the data and the rest for the various Linux partitions (including a root of 37Gb).
How to manage the permissions to allow me to read and write on the "Data" (the 25Gb, "D" for XP) partition from both XP and Linux?
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.

Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ is supposedly stable, BUT if you don't have a good backup plan for your data, you should stick with fat32 as ndarko suggested.
try opening an terminal an mounting the partition manually
mount -t vfat /dev/hdXX /mnt/some_dir -o rw
/dev/hdXX is a file pointing to your real partition. If you do not know whitch one it is you cen do
fdisk /dev/hda or fdisk/dev/hdb o fdisk /dev/sda depending on which bus/channel your HDD is connected, and see the partition table (remember to exit fdisk with q! so not to make any changes to the hdd)
After mounting you should be able to access the partition
if that works edit your /et/fstab file to make the partition auto mount each restart.
ndarko,
Thanks for this, but I am afraid it is way beyond my capabilities... :-( Since that partition was NTFS when I set up Linux, I guess I have to change the mounting point for Linux to recognise what became a Fat32 partition. What should be the new mounting point? I will use the Linux Control Centre to do it...
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: ndarkoPosted on 2007-06-16 at 05:41:18ID: 19297920
I will guess that the partitions in the linux are ext3. )
If you want to write from the windows to the linux partitions you can use EXT2 IFS for windows (http://www.fs-driver.org/
In order to access the ntfs partitions from Linux you need an Linux kernel module for the ntfs and as far as I am informed there are a couple of solutions and no one of them is good enough. The native Linux kernel driver for ntfs is still in dev/test phase and supports reading of ntfs partitions and partially writing (in some cases it can corupt files like appending to file - last time I red on that subject). If you choose to go this way the kernel module must be compiled with write support (depends on version of distribution - you might need to recompile the kernel), and then mount the partition with options -o rw.
There is also an wrapper for the original windows ntfs drivers which is relatively easy to install, but then there is a very big performance hit when you use that partition.
The way I still use mu Linux is to have an second partition (like your D partition) formated in Fat32 and then you have no problems accessing the files from linux.