ok, so i can use /mnt to view my windows NTFS Drives, but they are read only when i look at them this way, is there anyway that i can write to an NTFS drive?

I was looking for info on that. I think that it is possible, but VERY unsafe.
read only supported... I have two ntfs formatted 40GB drives, and man, their full of nothing but mp3s. I think I will have to just buy a new 40GB or more drive to act as a "transfer drive". Then I can reformat ext3.

blackulafedora1 - but not for long. I am about ready to change distros. I never liked fedoracore, well, its just like red hat, as far as I can tell, but im no pro. I did like slackware, it comes with some great programs, and I know that its in some way based on BSD. (which I'd like to run someday) :-)

blackula

not safetly, it 2.6.5 kernel it says that
"The only supported operation is overwriting existing files, without changing the file length." You can't delete/add directories or delete/add files

[EDIT]
I think I should note that FAT32 is perfectly safe on read/write. So you could read/write needed date from both linux and windows, compared to using ntfs or a linux filesystem.

Writing to Windows partitions from Linux should be considered experimental only. -- J.W.

i believe there is a program called qtparted which can convert from NTFS to FAT32 so you could safely write and read to it

hmm... not exactly what i was looking for, but i'll keep that in mind - will it keep all data intact, and will FAT32 be compatible with SAMBA server? or better yet, can i convert FAT32 to Linux file system?

Use the Captive NTFS driver instead of the kernel NTFS driver.

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

i'm not a samba expert but seeing as samba is designed for windows and linux on the same network it seems like it would work with FAT32. It could convert FAT32 to a linux file system but then windows would become unusable unless you had some nifty driver that let windows read that type of filesystem. (probably none exists). I'm not even sure if QTparted can convert. I think it can...and if it can it would conserve your data...but a safer route to go would be to defrag your windows NTFS partition w/ windows defragger until all the data is at the begining of the drive then use QTparted (or a SuSE install disk) to shrink the NTFS partition (w/ out data loss) then you could make a new VFAT/FAT32 partition in the new unpartitioned space and linux and windows can both safely write and read files from it. Also converting a file system can take quite a while, where as shrinking it is a lot shorter because it doesn't have to redo any files it just has to mess with the start of the partition and tell it to be smaller and since u deffragged it won't cut off any data.

Captive NTFS works fine for me. It is slow though. I mount the drives using the default ntfs read only drivers, then if I need to write to the drive I will unmount it and use captive.

The easiest solution if you're setting up your system is to dedicate a shared partition and make it FAT32.