NTFS Support in Linux Systems

NTFS support has been slow in coming to Linux. But new drivers are now available that enable you to read from, and even to write to, NTFS partitions, including removable media formatted with NTFS.

More than twenty years ago, Microsoft licensed its operating system to IBM for inclusion with its new personal computer. PC-DOS, as it was known in its IBM form, had many features and limitations, but one feature that has grown in importance well beyond the realm of the DOS world is its filesystem. The File Allocation Table (FAT) filesystem, named after its key data structure, is perhaps the most widely implemented filesystem in the history of computing.

The FAT file system is used (or at least supported) by everything from digital cameras to mainframe computers. This makes FAT the filesystem of choice for cross-platform data exchange on removable disks, and also an excellent way to exchange data between OSes in a multi-boot configuration on a single computer.