Resizing an NTFS partition........

[Joe Malin]

Well, at the risk of sounding like a complete n00b, I am puzzled by the
statement
"The major problem with NTFS is not it's inodes, but it's journal -data
added to it gets out of sync with what's on the disk (for reasons that
I've never understood and can find no docs on either.Maybe the NTFS
driver developers have the same problem). "

I thought that this sort of thing was a problem with old, original FAT16
scheme in DOS; the FAT in memory could get out of sync with the FAT on
the disk, leading to broken chains. This particularly happened if you
had to reboot to recover from a crashed program. Keep in mind that this
was pre-Windows. Back in those days, I used to run chkdsk on *each boot*
to handle this sort of thing.

I also thought that this out-of-sync problem occurred in Unix filesystem
as well, which was one of the reasons you didn't want to shut down a
Unix box by turning the power off.

*And*, I thought that NTFS had fixed this, which is why chkdsk isn't
usually needed.

Can anyone set me straight on this?

I have to say that Microsoft has it easy; it's always easy to code for
an OS system that you have complete control over. Also, IMHO, you can
criticize the Ubuntu engineers if you yourself have had to write the
file system part of an OS and found it easy. There are bugs, and there
are bugs, and there are bugs that screw up the user's data. Seems to me
that working on the file system is the most dangerous job in SW
engineering...

Joe

Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Saturday 29 April 2006 10:58, Chanchao wrote:
>   
>> .........just works. :-)
>>
>> I couldn't believe it.. For an operating system that doesn't allow
>> you to save a simple file to an NTFS drive "because it's not open &
>> free but patented by evil MS who doesn't release the
>> specifications, boo hoo hoo hoo, so we can not be
>> 100000000000000000000000% sure that it would work so we're not
>> doing it at all, so there. snif.".
>>     
>
> It's not like that at all and you are misrepresenting the reality. 
> NTFS is a horrendously complex file system and the 
> reverse-engineering effort has not uncovered all the complexities and 
> subtle interactions. In the absense of a simple engineering 
> specification document, the developers can never be sure they have 
> discovered everything that needs to be done. Therefore, in the 
> interests of saving YOUR data, the developers recommend you consider 
> NTFS read-only with minimal write abilities (i.e. no increase or 
> decrease in file length).
>
>   
>