4 Legato Systems, Inc. (http://www.legato.com) have sponsored Anton Altaparmakov
5 to develop NTFS on Linux since June 2001.
7 To mount an NTFS volume, use the filesystem type 'ntfs'. The driver
8 currently works only in read-only mode, with no fault-tolerance supported.
10 If you enable the dangerous(!) write support, make sure you can recover
11 from a complete loss of data. Also, download the Linux-NTFS project
12 distribution from Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/
13 and always run the included ntfsfix utility after performing a write to an
14 NTFS partition from Linux to fix some of the damage done by the Linux NTFS
15 driver and to schedule an automatic chkdsk when Windows reboots. You should
16 run ntfsfix _after_ unmounting the partition in Linux but _before_ rebooting
17 into Windows. During the next reboot into Windows, chkdsk will be run
18 automatically fixing the remaining damage. If no errors are found it is a
19 good indication that the driver + ntfsfix together worked to full
22 Please note that the experimental write support is limited to Windows NT4 and
23 earlier versions at the moment.
25 If you think you have discovered a bug please have look at the "Known bugs"
26 section below to see whether it isn't known already.
28 For ftdisk support, limited success was reported with volume sets on top of
29 the md driver, although mirror and stripe sets should work as well - if the
30 md driver can be talked into using the same layout as Windows NT. However,
31 using the md driver will fail if any of your NTFS partitions have an odd
34 Supported mount options
35 =======================
37 iocharset=name Character set to use when returning file names.
38 Unlike VFAT, NTFS suppresses names that contain
39 unconvertible characters. Note that most character
40 sets contain insufficient characters to represent all
41 possible Unicode characters that can exist on NTFS. To
42 be sure you are not missing any files, you are advised
43 to use the iocharset=utf8 which should be capable of
44 representing all Unicode characters.
46 utf8=<bool> Use UTF-8 for converting file names. - It is preferable
47 to use iocharset=utf8 instead, but if the utf8 NLS is
48 not available, you can use this utf8 option, which
49 enables the driver's builtin utf8 conversion functions.
53 umask= These options work as documented in mount(8).
54 By default, the files are owned by root and
55 not readable by anyone else.
57 posix=<bool> If enabled, the file system distinguishes between
58 upper and lower case. The 8.3 alias names are presented
59 as hard links instead of being suppressed.
61 show_sys_files=<bool> If enabled, show all system files as normal files. Note
62 that $MFT does not appear unless specifically
63 requested. For example in bash, use: "ls -l \$MFT".
64 Be careful not to write anything to them or you could
65 crash the kernel and/or corrupt your file system!
67 mft_zone_multiplier= Set the MFT zone multiplier for the volume (this
68 setting is not persistent across mounts and can be
69 changed from mount to mount but cannot be changed on
70 remount). Values of 1 to 4 are allowed, 1 being the
71 default. The MFT zone multiplier determines how much
72 space is reserved for the MFT on the volume. If all
73 other space is used up, then the MFT zone will be
74 shrunk dynamically, so this has no impact on the
75 amount of free space. However, it can have an impact
76 on performance by affecting fragmentation of the MFT.
77 In general use the default. If you have a lot of small
78 files then use a higher value. The values have the
80 Value MFT zone size (% of volume size)
86 Known bugs and (mis-)features
87 =============================
89 - Do not use the driver for writing as it corrupts the file system. If you do
90 use it, get the Linux-NTFS tools and use the ntfsfix utility after
91 dismounting a partition you wrote to.
93 - Writing of extension records is not supported properly.
95 Please send bug reports/comments/feed back/abuse to the Linux-NTFS development
96 list at sourceforge: linux-ntfs-dev@lists.sourceforge.net
102 - Fixed bug with reading $MFT where we try to read higher mft records
103 before having read the $DATA attribute of $MFT. (Note this is only a
104 partial solution which will only work in the case that the attribute
105 list is resident or non-resident but $DATA is in the first 1024
106 bytes. But this should be enough in the majority of cases. I am not
107 going to bother fixing the general case until someone finds this to
108 be a problem for them, which I doubt very much will ever happen...)
109 - Fixed bogus BUG() call in readdir().
112 - Fixed two bugs in ntfs_readwrite_attr(). Thanks to Jan Kara for
113 spotting the out of bounds one.
114 - Check return value of set_blocksize() in ntfs_read_super() and make
115 use of get_hardsect_size() to determine the minimum block size.
116 - Fix return values of ntfs_vcn_to_lcn(). This should stop
117 peoples start of partition being overwritten at random.
120 - Fixed ntfs_getdir_unsorted(), ntfs_readdir() and ntfs_printcb() to
121 cope with arbitrary cluster sizes. Very important for Win2k+. Also,
122 make them detect directories which are too large and truncate the
123 enumeration pretending end of directory was reached. Detect more
124 error conditions and overflows. All this fixes the problem where the
125 driver could end up in an infinite loop under certain circumstances.
126 - Fixed potential memory leaks in Unicode conversion functions and
127 setup correct NULL return values.
131 - Enhanced & bug fixed cluster deallocation (race fixes, etc.)
132 - Complete rewrite of cluster allocation, now race free.
133 - Fixed several bugs in the attribute modification codepaths.
134 - Hopefully fixed bug where the first sectors of some people's
135 partitions would be overwritten by the mft. And in general fixed up
136 mft extension code a bit (still incomplete though).
137 - Introduce splice_runlist() to allow generic splicing of two run
139 - MFT zone is now implemented. [Stage 2 of 3; only lack dynamic
140 growing of mft zone but that is AFAIK not even done by Windows, and
141 the overhead would be so large that it is probably not worth doing
142 at all, so Stage 3 might never happen...]
143 - Complete rewrite of $MFT extension and ntfs inode allocation code.
144 - Made the NTFS driver initialization string show the compile options
145 used (i.e. whether read-only or read-write, whether a module, and
146 whether with debug support).
147 - Modify ntfs_fill_mft_header() to set all fields and to accept more
149 - Get rid of superfluous add_mft_header().
150 - Get rid of some unused code.
151 - Fixed several bugs in and generally cleaned up ntfs_readdir,
152 ntfs_getdir_unsorted(), and ntfs_printcb. Now they spew out huge
153 amounts of debug output if debugging is enabled. This will be
154 removed once I know that this works for everyone.
155 - ntfs_readdir now shows hidden files. The only files that are now
156 hidden are the first 16 inodes (i.e. the hard coded system files),
157 which is consistent with Windows NT4. Using the show_sys_files mount
158 option, these files are then shown, too.
159 - Fixed the displaying of the "." and ".." directories. We still cannot
160 cope with more than 65536 files in a directory index block which is
161 not a problem and we now cannot cope with more than 32766 directory
162 index blocks which should not be a problem unless you have a
163 directory with an insanely large number of files in it. The exact
164 number depends on the length of the file names of the directory
165 entries and on the size of the dircetory index blocks.
166 - Fixed all problems with the last file in a directory (e.g. the last
167 file should no longer disappear and tab completion should work). If
168 there are still disappearing files or any other problems with the
169 last file in a directory, please report them! Thanks.
170 - Rewrote ntfs_extend_attr() to use the new cluster allocator and the
171 freshly introduced splice_runlists() function. This simplified
172 ntfs_extend_attr() a lot which in turn seems to have removed one or
174 - Probably other things I have forgotten... (-;
175 - Removed dollar signs from the names in the system file enumeration.
176 Apparently gcc doesn't support dollar signs on PPC architecture.
177 (Andrzej Krzysztofowicz)
181 - Fixed system file handling. No longer need to use show_sys_files
182 option for driver to work fine. System files are now always treated
183 the same, but without the option, they are made invisible to
184 directory listings. As a result system files can once again be opened
185 even without the show_sys_files option. This is important for the
186 statfs system call to work properly, for example.
187 - Implemented MFT zone including mount parameter to tune it (just like
188 in Windows via the registry, only we make it per mount rather than
189 global for the whole driver, so we are better but we have no way of
190 storing the value as we don't have a registry so either specify on
191 each mount or put it in /etc/fstab). [Stage 1 of 3, mount parameter
193 - Fixed fixup functions to handle corruption cases and to return error
195 - Made fixup functions apply hotfixes where sensible. [Stage 1 of 2+,
197 - Fixed ommission of "NTFS: " string in ntfs_error() output.
198 - Fixed stupid if statement bug in unistr.c. Thanks to Yann E. Morin
200 - Get rid of all uses of max and min macros. This actually allowed for
201 optimizing the code in several places so it was a Good Thing(TM).
202 - Make ntfs use generic_file_open to enforce the O_LARGEFILE flag.
203 - Detect encrypted files and refuse to access them (return EACCES
204 error code to user space).
205 - Fix handling of encrypted & compressed files so that an encrypted
206 file no longer is considered to be compressed (this was causing
207 kernel segmentation faults).
211 - Removed non-functional uni_xlate mount options.
212 - Clarified the semantics of the utf8 and iocharset mount options.
213 - Threw out the non-functional mount options for using hard coded
214 character set conversion. Only kept utf8 one.
215 - Fixed handling of mount options and proper handling of faulty mount
217 - Cleaned up character conversion which basically became simplified a
218 lot due to the removal of the above mentioned mount options.
219 - Made character conversion to be always consistent. Previously we
220 could output to the VFS file names which we would then not accept
221 back from the VFS so in effect we were generating ghost entries in
222 the directory listings which could not be accessed by any means.
223 - Simplified time conversion functions drastically without sacrificing
225 - Fixed a use of a pointer before the check for the pointer being
226 NULL, reported by the Stanford checker.
227 - Fixed several missing error checks, reported by the Stanford
228 checker and fixed by Rasmus Andersen.
230 NTFS 1.1.15 (changes since kernel 2.4.4's NTFS driver):
232 - New mount option show_sys_files=<bool> to show all system files as
234 - Support for files and in general any attributes up to the full 2TiB
235 size supported by the NTFS filesystem. Note we only support up to
236 32-bits worth of inodes/clusters at this point.
237 - Support for more than 128kiB sized runlists (using vmalloc_32()
238 instead of kmalloc()).
239 - Fixed races in allocation of clusters and mft records.
240 - Fixed major bugs in attribute handling / searching / collation.
241 - Fixed major bugs in compressing a run list into a mapping pairs array.
242 - Fixed major bugs in inode allocation. Especially file create and
244 - Fixed memory leaks.
245 - Fixed major bug in inode layout assignment of sequence numbers.
246 - Lots of other bug fixes I can't think of right now...
247 - Fixed NULL bug found by the Stanford checker in ntfs_dupuni2map().
248 - Convert large stack variable to dynamically allocated one in
249 ntfs_get_free_cluster_count() (found by Stanford checker).