NTFS partially working?! USB only??

[Reziac]

Does the current ROS have partial NTFS support?

ROS on installed physical HD, partition 1.
It can see but not read partition 2, which is NTFS.
All expected behavior, since I understand NTFS support is still in the future.

Then I had a brain cramp and plugged in a USB stick that is formatted NTFS -- and ROS read it just fine. Saw all the files including some over 4GB. Could open textfiles and run programs from it. (However ROS could not copy files from nor write to the USB stick.)

I don't understand why ROS can read NTFS on the USB stick, but not on the 2nd hard disk partition.

BTW are you aware of the data wrapping bug in FAT32 ?? FAT32 partitions over 32GB can experience data loss that mimics HD failure. This is why there was a 32GB limit in the old version of FDISK. (Been there, done that, found MSFT's documentation on the problem.)

[ROCKNROLLKID]

ReactOS should be able to read NTFS, as read and mount support is done. In order for them to get more file systems working, they need to finish up the cache manager. The only file system that is done right now is ext2, which is good enough for since its a flash friendly file system for my SSD and hopefully they designed to handle large files and partitions.

More information here: https://www.reactos.org/wiki/File_Systems

To be honest, I don't think we will see NTFS support anytime soon, if at all really.

[Reziac]

Ah, okay, I didn't realise mount/read was in the one I'm using: ReactOS-0.4.4-FOSDEM2017RC-Hybrid.iso
as the wiki mentioned v0.5

Tho I remain puzzled as to why it read NTFS on the USB stick but not on the other HD partition. Or does it only work with an NTFS device mounted after ROS is fully running? (BTW if the USB stick was attached during boot, ROS hung before loading anything.)

I sure hope full NTFS support is in its future, both for compatibility and because of the FAT32 data-wrapping bug that limits safe partition size to 32GB. (This bug was responsible for the rash of "failed" 40GB HDs when those first appeared, back in the Win98 era.)

Anyway, back to seeing what all it can do.

[ROCKNROLLKID]

It is probably hard for them to get Fat32 to handle large partitions, as it was never originally designed to, although it is possible to. The issue is still that it can only handle max 4gb files. There is another Fat filesystem called FAT+ that can handle file sizes up to 256gb, but it would probably be better for them to just get other file systems to work and just drop fat entirely.

[Heis Spiter]

Reziac, I would be interested by any debug log you can provide me from ReactOS boot to your attempt to access your second partition (NTFS one).
Is it at least mounted (ie, drive letter assigned)?

[Reziac]

Oh, crap, I already cloned the first partition to it (see, this is your own fault; ROS is behaving well enough that I decided to keep a clean copy for reference and backup) and that of course turned it into FAT32. But I can nuke it and reformat it as NTFS (okay, done, it mounts it again as before). Where is the bootlog file?

Yes, it did assign a drive letter to the HD's NTFS partition. But beyond that it acted like the partition was blank. I found that odd when it could read the contents of the NTFS USB stick.

The USB stick is set up with Easy2Boot so has a second partition that is a linux filesystem. ROS saw and mounted that partition too, tho couldn't access it.

Just found a nasty bug: Was trying to create a desktop shortcut (I prefer "Explorer_old" because Detail View sticks!) and could not get it to move the .lnk to the desktop. So I tried the old trick of moving the .EXE instead. Fine, now the .EXE is on the Desktop, not what I wanted. So I tried to move it back, and it moved the file all right, but turned it into a zero-byte file. Ooops.

I should perhaps mention my fearsome repute as "the beta tester who can break anything"... [ external image ]