Read AND Write access to windows partitions (NTFS) from PCLinuxOS

By default PCLinuxOS supports Read Only access to windows disk partitions formated as NTFS. This was quite inconvenient to me because I have a 250Gb external disk (USB) already formated with NTFS that I use to store my pictures, films, backups, etc.

Fortunatelly, there is a workaround to have Read and Write access to NTFS in PCLinuxOS. It is called ntfs-3g and can be installed from the PCLinuxOS pakect manager. Doing the following:

1. Open the "Packet Manager" from your "pannel" (the bar on the bottom of the screen). If you are not in a root session (as you should!) type the root password to open the Packet Manager.
2. Once open, click on "Search" and type: ntfs
3. Right click on "ntfs-3g" and select "Mark for Installation"
4. Click on "Apply" and follow the instructions if any.

Now you are ready to have read/write access to your NTFS drives.

Let suppose you have a NTFS drive: /dev/sda1

1. Make sure that it is not already mounted. You can safely issue a: "umount /dev/sda1" to make sure it is unmounted, or you can check with "mount -l".
2. Find a mounting directory (or "point" in the linux jargon). If you do not have one already make it yourself, for example you could create the directory /media/ext_disk
3. Issue the following command to mount the drive:
   mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/ext_disk

The system will give you a warning about needing the linux kernel 2.6.20 (PCLinuxOS 2007 is still on 2.6.18.8, when are they going to port it to 2.6.20?). There is no fix for this, and in theory it is NOT SAFE to run it like, this, but so far I haven't had any problems yet (only 3 days playing with it, I'll try to report back later on).

If you want the NTFS to be read/write from boot time then you need to add the following line in /etc/fstab (modified for your drive and mount point, of course):

/dev/hda1 /media/disk ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

You are done! Now you can read/write to NTFS... but because of the warning above please play it safe and if things go wrong please remember that you were warned :-)

I later found another alternative. Install ntfs-config from the Packet Manager and the run the command "ntfs-config" follow the instructions and it will configure your NTFSs for write access.