Hello, I can access all my windows partitions (NTFS) in linux (mandrake 9.1) however it seems to be read only, I can only open files, neither create new or paste onto the partitions. The same goes for my USB disk. Any ideas?

I am not a Linux guru so my post may be a little off. Please correct me on anything I've posted that is wrong, I learn this way too :) Linux (some distros at least) can write to a NTFS drive but it is disabled by default. I believe you can recompile your kernel to enable this. I think it is disabled because the write code is either buggy or just considered unsafe for some reason. Your best bet would be to create a Fat32 shared partition. Anything you need to modified goes to this drive. Sandman An Official Microsoft Minion. ÿ

Microsoft never released the specs for NTFS, so the best Linux developers can do is reverse engineer it. Right now you have two options. You can use the free kernel NTFS write support, but you won't be able to change the size of files, or you can use Captive, a wrapper for the Windows NTFS.sys driver. Captive will give you full rw support, but I'm not sure if I would trust it with data that isn't backed up regularly.

Or upgrade to the latest kernel, 2.6.x, because it would give you an option to write to your NTFS but use it as your own risk... If somehow you trash your NTFS while doing it, don't come back here crying about it! The safest way is to create a FAT32 partition to share between Mandrake and XP. taurus

As far as I know, even in 2.6, the free kernel-based write support will destroy NTFS after only minimal writing if you try to change file sizes.

Ok, I have created a FAT32 Partition to use (G:) and have changed the current G: drive to L: drive In windows xp this all works fine, however linux did not detect this update, it still shows only 6 drives even though there are now 7.