[colug-432] NTFS on CentOS6...

[Rob Funk]

On Monday, February 13, 2012 12:24:25 PM Joshua Kramer wrote:
> Has anyone had issues with NTFS support on CentOS 6?

NTFS write support outside of Windows is iffy at best. I believe the ntfs-3g 
project (which as I recall is a user-mode filesystem) is your best bet, but I 
try to avoid NTFS entirely if I can.

> I have a 320G USB disk.  I wanted to use it to store backups of my data, to
> include ISO's, and to be readable by my Windows 7 and CentOS 6 boxes.
> Because some of the ISO's are >4G, FAT32 isn't an option.

Have you considered using UDF instead?
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format
(It looks like version2.01 have the best compatibility.)
See if CentOS has a udftools package, and use its mkudffs command.

> If I reformat this partition to ext2, there are no I/O errors, and the
> files appear to arrive on-disk intact.  However, if I do this, then the
> FAT32 partition is unreadable under Windows.

That's weird.

> I have another USB disk, it is an older 40G IDE model, formatted NTFS.
> CentOS shows no I/O errors writing to this disk.

There are probably NTFS options or format changes that are different for 
larger disks, and those might be less well supported since they're newer.