I NEED TO GET LINUX TO READ MY WINDOWS NTFS DRIVE. I AM USING REH HAT LINUX AND IT DOES NOT SUPPORT NTFS TO MY KNOWLEDGE. I HAVE TRYED TO MOUNT THE HD BUT IT RETURN WITH AN ERROR. I HAVE BEEN TOLD TO RECOMPILE BUT I AM NEW AND I HAVE NO CLUE WHERE TO START ON RECOMPILING THE KERNAL. I KNOW PROGRAMMING BUT I AM NOT SURE WHERE THE FILES FOR THE KERNAL ARE OR WHAT PROGRAM OR COMMAND TO USE TO COMPILE WITH. IF SOMEONE COULD PLEASE HELP ME AND NOT SEND ME TO www.kernel.org ,BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO HELP THERE, I WOULD BE VERY GREATFULL.

The files for the kernel are at: ftp://ftp.kernel.org Once you got the kernel source, and unpacked it, there is a README file inside. When you run "make config/menuconfig/xconfig" (see the README), make sure you answer yes to NTFS read support.

I had the exact same problem. The issue here is that RH does not support NTFS out of the box. You do have to recompile the kernel to include support for ntfs. However, even after doing so, you should be aware that ntfs support in linux is far from completed. Reading ntfs is fairly stable and reliable, however, writing to ntfs is still very dangerous and will most definitely damage your ntfs partition. With that said, if you want to recompile you kernel, i suggest you pick up "Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide 2nd Ed." by Steve Shah. This book has helped me more than any other and has an entire chapter on recompiling the kernel.

Depending on your requirements, the easiest thing might be to create a FAT32 partition for data that you want to share between windows and linux. Linux will have no trouble with accessing that, and neither will windows.