Joseph Sinclair wrote:

>It's not a huge risk, but it's still a risky proposition to edit NTFS files from Linux.  My comment was for instructions on how to edit the files, understanding that the user takes the risk of damage to the NTFS system.
>
I'm inclined to echo Micah's comment:  "... if you do choose to enable 
read/write capability on your NTFS partitions under Linux I would advise 
you to keep full and frequent backups."

A far better arrangement is to minimize your use of NTFS if you can.  
That assumes that using XP at all is somewhat of a compromise.  Let your 
system files live on NTFS, but arrange to put as much user data as 
possible onto a FAT32 partition where Linux can fully share them.  And 
if you want to tinker with any NTFS files from Linux, save them to FAT32 
and put them back into the NTFS side when you have Windows running.

Note that parted and some other tools do a nice job of resizing NTFS 
partitions.  So even if you currently have a big NTFS partition, if it's 
not full, you could convert some of that to FAT32 for compatibility.

I have a fair amount of Linux operations using FAT32 so the files are 
equally accessible to Windows.  I do run into problems such as links not 
working, and everything being owned by root with 777 permissions.  But 
those are the only times I really notice that they're not Linux partitions.

This is an XP machine that was set up from the get-go to share with 
Linux, so for example I set up my mail system on the FAT32 partition 
where the mailbox can be used by Thunderbird whether I'm running Linux 
or XP.  I've learned to avoid downloading mail under XP, it doesn't 
handle the filters compatibly with the Linux version, but at least I can 
look at my mail in XP.  All my "good stuff" sits on FAT32, and it feels 
"native" from both XP and Linux.

Good luck,

Vic

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