Installing and Configuring Captive NTFS

NOTE THAT THIS IS EXPERIMENTAL AND IS GUARANTEED NOT TO WORK. IF YOU GET IT WORKINGm, YOU ARE LUCKY. I, AlexRoman, WILL POST BACK INFORMATION ON HOW TO REALLY GET THIS WORKING, FOR IT IS POSSIBLE

NTFS"> About Captive NTFS

Captive NTFS allows you to load up the Windows 2000/XP driver for the NTFS file system and use it. With it you can mount a NTFS partition read/write in a safe manner.

Preliminary steps

We need to install a few dependencies first. Go ahead and issue these commands to install them:

$ sudo apt-get install libreadline5-dev libpopt-dev libgnomevfs2-dev libntfs-dev libgnomeui-dev 

We need to fetch the source of the captive-ntfs program from http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/. Get the latest version!

Building the source and installing it

Building the source is fairly straight forward nowadays. Issue these commands:

tar xvzf captive-1.1.5.tar.gz
cd captive-1.1.5
./configure --enable-lufs=no --enable-install-pkg=yes --with-readline=yes --prefix=/usr
make
sudo groupadd captive
sudo useradd -g captive captive
sudo make install

During sudo make install, if or when the program seems to have stalled, press ENTER to continue.

NTFS"> Configuring Captive NTFS

We need to run the acquire program to acquire ntoskrnl.exe and ntfs.sys from an existing Windows installation or the internet.

sudo mkdir /windows
sudo mount /dev/hda1 /windows
sudo captive-install-acquire

Press Forward and follow the prompts.

-- AlexRoman - 09 Aug 2005