Windows

[John]

Cefiar wrote:
> On Monday 03 October 2005 08:21, Dennis Kaarsemaker wrote:
> 
>>On zo, 2005-10-02 at 22:14 +0000, Tommy Single wrote:
>>
>>>Just to get this straight, Ubuntu can accept Windows stuff?  It is
>>>compatible with Windows file system?
>>
>>Depends on which windows stuff you mean. Linux can perfectly fine read
>>from FAT32 and NTFS.
> 
> 
> I can qualify that a bit better on the NTFS part. I had a corrupted NTFS filesystem (Approx 300GB of data on a 500GB disk that was getting errors) and using Ubuntu (Hoary) I managed to copy off all the data that was even remotely possible to read, without much trouble (terminal/shell and using cp no less).
> 
> Under Windows, I couldn't even access parts of the filesystem at all. Note that Windows wasn't actually on the disk in question, it was just storage space. It would fail, and depending on what Windows felt like, the disk would (listed in order of occurance) either:
>  1. Lock, causing the system to lock and requiring a reboot.
>  2. Be automatically unmounted.
>  3. Skip the problem areas, pretending the remainder of any particular directory from that point on didn't exist. This means that if the corrupted file was the first file in the directory, we couldn't get anything out of the remainder of the directory. This is really annoying when there are corrupted files in the top level of the filesystem.

Windows would
a) Expect to "know" where everything should be, what everything should mean.
b) Probably want to write to the disk.

OTOH Linux's write capabilities to NTFS are strictly mimited, its 
understanding of the fields less comprehensive and, presumably, the code 
is more defensive on that accunt.

While one can mount ext2 ro, it's likely Linux is less tolerant of 
errors in the filesystem, because it "doesn't need to be."