Hi folks,
from time to time I have a "Linux fever" and like to try a new distro as LiveCD.
I manage to download (about 30 hours ) Suse LiveDVD 9.3 and liked it (for those of us used to güindous it looks quite similar, and Yast rocks). But even I could see my hard drive (NTFS file system) but could not access it (if I remember well, sorry, it was a couple of months ago).

I also downloaded Ubuntu and Kubuntu LiveCD (I don't have torrent so didn't download DVD), but Ubuntu didn't even recognise my hard drive.

I tried then Knoppix LiveCD 3.9. It let me access my NTFS hard drive, and open files, so I can have an idea how it works (that's why I like LiveCD can access my hard drive). But when I try to write a file to the hard drive, it throws an error. I know this is a security measure, in order you don't destroy valious information, but I wan't to be able to work with LiveCD and write to the hard drive (QTparted also didn't work, and I guess it was for the same reason). I could write to an USB pendrive, or make a FAT partition, but I would rather prefer to access to just write to my HD.

I browsed the web, and found several solutions: write click the hard drive icon and change permisions, and unmark read only. But didn't work. I tried from Root Shell "mount -o remount,rw /mnt/hda1", but also didn't work.

I would like someone told me a way to be able to read/write my NTFS hard drive from Knoppix LiveCD (or Ubuntu or SuSE, if not possible with Knoppix). Please, I'll thank your advise, as I'm an absolute noob (see below ).

And now a crazy idea I had some time ago (I think I even posted it once). When I see so many linux distros, with that software every developers found interesting to put in there, and when I read how easy is to make a LiveCD with your desired programs, I wonder: would it be difficult to compile a KVCD distro with those Linux applications necessary for "Advanced Video Conversion" ?. I think that there are little free distributable programs in Linux for that, but... what do you think?. Is it possible?. Would it be legal to distribute it?.
Don't say I didn't warned you it was crazy...
It could be done in LiveCD format, even it wouldn't be practical to encode from it, but people could take a look at it and try it, and I think a LiveCD can be installed to hard drive and work from there... It could include some scripts for encoding with mencoder (any other Linux free MPEG encoder out there?),...
Well, waiting your kind () answers

May be I'm still far in the past but write access on NTFS partition is not supported in Linux, whatever the edition.

Yes Phil, it used to be.
Well I have no knowledge on this, but I think read/write support in NTFS improved a lot, and it can be done, but with risk of erasing or losing accidentally your data.
In fact in Knoppix LiveCD info warns it can be done at your own risk. I don't mind to assume the risk, it's just I don't know howto.

Even under the newest 2.6 kernel ntfs filesystem support is limited to read only by default. You can compile a 2.6 kernel with NTFS_WRITE support which is still classed as testing since M$ won't divulge the information about how to write to ntfs it's all trial and error.

When building the kernel, run menuconfig, goto the filesystems then to the dos/fat/nt filesystem section, set ntfs write support to a *. That will enable the experimental write support.

On the live cd's do this...

unmount your ntfs partition as normal if it's already auto-mounted (the command is umount)

Then try and re-mount it read-write

mount /dev/hda5 -t ntfs /mnt/ntdrive -o rw
replace hda5 with your partition and /mnt/ntdrive with a path where you want it mounted

Then at a bash prompt

cat /proc/mounts

Look for your partition number /dev/hda* and it should have a 'ro' or a 'rw' on the same line. If it's 'ro' then its read only and thus you can't write, if it's 'rw' then you should indeed be able to write to the ntfs drive. It's doubtful the livecd's will have it enabled though in fear of newbies trashing their windows installations and wondering why :P

__________________
Mark

Thanx Phil and Scrappy.
I see that writing support commented in FAQ in LiveCD must just be related to nonNTFS partitions. I read elsewhere that support had improve a lot, but maybe not implemented yet in distributions. And obviously in Unix world there's not much interest in developing a way to work with güindous NTFS filesystem. I'll try what you suggested... building the kernel, I'll try it when I decide to install Linux (still "playing" with it).

And what about the idea of compiling a KVCD Linux LiveCD with all software available and needed inside?. Do you think it is viable, could be done?. How can we support it, those of us without knowledge and even without Linux installed
I find it a good idea, but maybe it's just crazy and not possible to be done.

Hi Scrappy,
your trick worked fine (you are not surprised of that, are you?) and I could right click on harddrive icon and see rw - rw - rw... but when I click on it to mount it, it gives an error, and also says I don't have enough privilegies to access it...

I don't understand. I can access the harddrive, but not write to it without the trick. Afetr I do the trick, it doesn't let me access.
I wonder, since I did it from root shell, if maybe this way I just make it accessible to root, and as I cannot change the user... Maybe if I do your trick from the shell it will work. What do you think?.

After googling a bit I found loads of linux distros for rescue system, every with those programs each compiler chose. I still dream about a KVCD Linux LiveCD....

By default when mounting an ntfs partition as read/write it sets the privileges to rwx------ and all files and directories are owned by root, thus a normal user cannot access or write to the mounted drive. Another just in case condition I guess, you can change this behaviour by supplying a umask and gid... firstly though you need to know which groups your a member of. Open a shell as the normal user (non-root, you should have a prompt ending with $ and not a #) and type 'groups' normally there will be a group called users and that will be shown, if not pick a likely user group candidate from the list.

Then try adding this -o part to the above mount command

-o rw, umask=0022, gid=users
replace users with the group you picked from that list

That should mount it read/write and give the normal users group access, if that fails then I doubt the livecd has ntfs support built in correctly. There is a project called 'captive' which, using some wine abilities, uses M$ own ntfs.sys driver under linux to provide you full read/write.. This is meant to be better than the kernel based filesystem to date.

Heh.. see above, your right though

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Mark