NTFS Volume with Samba?

[mtennant]

I'm trying to add a 160GB PATA drive to my system. It is already NTFS formatted and 1/2 full of data. It came out of a USB enclosure.

I want to use it as a network storage drive, for use only at night when differential backups from two wirelessly connected Windows XP laptops will occur. I will not be doing backups to this volume during any time when a call will be active. My system is a home based business server, very minimal, based on the "Walmart special" motherboard.

I've discovered that Centos does not have NTFS support installed by default. I see where there is an ntfs-3g driver available, with full read and write capabilities.

Has anyone ever done what I've described? If so how? I've seen the page below, but I'm not sure this is way to go in this case.

http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/NTFSPartitions

If this has not been done on PiaF, would you recommend I even attempt the above, or just backup the data to another drive and install the new volume using a native Linux file system and a Samba share?

I already have Samba setup and working and can browse the system drive over the network. The NTFS drive is already installed and is recognized by the hardware, but cannot be browsed or written to until NTFS support is installed.

Many thanks to all for your support. Hope this all makes sense.

 

[darmock]

I currently have a 500gb external running under FC8 using ntfs-3g and fuse. Works great but every so often it "breaks" and the system needs to be rebooted. I keep it around with NTFS as I still have a couple of XP-Vmware machines that I use under FC8 so I use that as a place to write my XP backups to. I have never tried it with a FC5 box however so good luck!

I do have an external 500gb that is formatted as ext3 which I use under both FC5 and FC8 with no problems...



Tom

 

[mtennant]

Thanks Tom. So is this link and the instructions there good in your mind?

http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/NTFSPartitions

Don't want to break anything.

 

[mtennant]

After some poking around, I see where the Centos kernel doesn't support FUSE. Now I'm getting into areas that are outside my confort zone, as I understand the kernel has to be recompiled to support it. I'm starting to think twice about using NTFS as a filesystem.