Am sure Microsoft will volunteer to update the code for a reasonable monthly subscription.
Mines the jacket with thirty-four years of experience dealing with MS in the pocket.
Linux 7.1 will have an optional new NTFS driver
The feature list for Linux kernel 7.1 is taking shape, and a standout addition has already landed: a new read-write NTFS driver. Now that kernel 7.0 is out, the all-seeing Eye of Torvalds has shifted its gaze to the future kernel 7.1, which is likely to appear in a couple of months. One standout feature has already been merged: …
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 00:43 GMT TReko
As someone who worked on writing an NTFS driver a quarter of a century ago, this was actually the problem. Microsoft would keep making undocumented changes to NTFS which caused headaches and eventual abandonment.
A much better coder than me, called Mark Russinovich, actually gave up on his own driver and developed a hack to load the actual NT NTFS.SYS driver under DOS.
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This post has been deleted by its author
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Monday 20th April 2026 20:11 GMT thames
What is this for?
I've read about this a number of times, but I've yet to see any explanation as to why anyone would want it. The one explanation that I have seen is that it is used by people who want to dual boot their PC in order to play games that don't work with WINE. Is that really a big enough use case to go through all this bother for however?
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Monday 20th April 2026 20:18 GMT Richard 12
Re: What is this for?
There's a lot of NTFS formatted partitions out there.
Most of them are in PCs running Windows, where the owner has yet to be convinced that they could switch to Linux.
They're not going to want to lose their existing data or spend a lot of time restoring backups onto a different filesystem.
The fewer barriers, the more likely they are to consider trying it.
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Wednesday 22nd April 2026 02:48 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re:Linux rescuing Windows users
As good many gormless Windows users over the years will attest to my copy of chntpw.
Don't think it works for win10&11 but no longer my problem in these days of retirement. :)
Actually still useful when someone pulls out an old PC needed to drive an old instrument but no one remaining recalls or knew the passwords.Typically XP or Win2k or NT4.
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Monday 20th April 2026 22:43 GMT doublelayer
Re: What is this for?
In addition to the correct posts about Windows partitions, another one is that a lot of external hard drives come preformatted as NTFS. It might be a good idea for people to reformat those when they obtain them, but not everyone does. There's another set of disks some Linux users might want to read and write. More generally though, the reason is completeness, which is why many of the other filesystems are in there. You can easily go a long time without any of them, but when they're frequently in use, it's common for someone to consider it useful to have it in Linux.
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 01:43 GMT David 132
Re: What is this for?
> a lot of external hard drives come preformatted as NTFS. It might be a good idea for people to reformat those when they obtain them, but not everyone does.
Absolutely; in particular, people who envisage using the external drive to swap data between Linux and Windows PCs (yes, we now have the Internet, but remember the old "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon full of
backup tapesUSB drives hurtling down the highway" cliché...). The latter OS does not have native support for reading most Linux filesystems, such as ext4. Sure, there's WSL and various third-party drivers, but you can't count on those being present on the Windows PC.-
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 09:17 GMT Kevin Johnston
Re: What is this for?
I am the proud owner of a number of caddies for NVME drives/boards/chips which connect via USB. They are the perfect replacement for thumbdrives and some of the ones I have are used for the old unit from laptops when they get upsized so no panic about lost files, others are used for music or video files so I can plug them into different computers or even the TV
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 09:03 GMT Liam Proven
Re: What is this for?
> I've yet to see any explanation as to why anyone would want it.
I am baffled how you can't. It's like asking what use a wheel is.
But other commenters have explained adequately. I will use this myself, I'm sure.
The thing is, even if you have such a drastically limited imagination you can't imagine you using it, do you not see that others might want and find useful things that you don't?
I mean, did you never own a Swiss army knife? I have no use for the thing that gets hooks out of boy-scouts' hooves or whatever it is, but clearly others have a need for it as it's been there forever and does not get removed.
On the gripping hand, it is common for tools to acquire new uses that are no longer relevant to their original purpose but which prolongs their utility far beyond their original function... _And that is a good thing._
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 10:04 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: What is this for?
Here's a particular instance that illustrates one use case:
My cousin-in-law fell victim* to a rather amateurish virus - it didn't actually overwrite the files, it wrote out new encrypted versions and just DEL-ed the originals which could be restored**.
However to be on the safe side and protect against future occurrences I repartitioned her drive and installed Zorin***. Being able to read N\tFS partitions in Linux enabled me to set up a folder which was a link to her original data on the original partition.
* Phished by an email purporting to be from someone she knew.
** Photorec to the rescue!
*** Contrary to the expectations of some of the nay-sayers she had no problems with the switch from W7 to Linux and from MS Office to Libre Office. She is now in her 90s and still uses it regularly. Even her Windows-using children in their 50s are able to use it. I've come to the conclusion that the only people who find a switch to Linux difficult are Windows-using IT folks of any age.
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 11:37 GMT doublelayer
Re: What is this for?
"I've come to the conclusion that the only people who find a switch to Linux difficult are Windows-using IT folks of any age."
In my experiences switching people to Linux, the less complex software someone uses, the easier a time they have it. If they spend their time in a browser and word processor, it's relatively easy. If they use more things, the difficulty increases, especially dependent on their willingness to accept change and your willingness to hand-hold them through software they're unfamiliar with. The difficulty I cite when changing organizations is the product of all of those user problems combined and the changes required to get all the institutional processes and tools switched over, which you can do but is going to be a lot harder than switching your basic user was.
To clarify, that doesn't mean that it's not worth doing, just that there will be difficulty and, if you don't plan for it, it can go wrong and be abandoned. If you have a reason to do it which you can explain to management and a plan for how to accomplish it without breaking much, it's likely going to work. Unfortunately, I know a few people who want to do it without those things and, in my experience, they end up disappointed after realizing how far from optional those are.
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Thursday 23rd April 2026 16:31 GMT bill 27
Re: What is this for?
When I plug a USB device videos into my TV it works. The TV expects NTFS and avi. Been using it like that for a looooong time and I quit using Windows even longer ago. Oh yeah...one of the cars stereo wants NTFS for the USB containing music, gave up on listening to the radio decades ago.
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Monday 20th April 2026 21:06 GMT Missing Semicolon
Ownership nonsense
The last time I mounted a Windows boot partition with Linux, it helpfully changed the ownership of every directory I looked at to be me, to I could read it. This, of course, rendered the drive unbootable.
I'm sure it used to just blithely ignore the NTFS permissions, and read all files without changing everything. Very handy for looking at \Windows\system32. What does the new driver do?
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Monday 20th April 2026 23:09 GMT Denarius
Re: Ownership nonsense
Odd, Been reading NTFS and writing disks from Linux for decades and not had a problem. Perhaps you missed the mapping of NTFS to unix like systems is not 1-2-1 the ownership and group is faked to the mounting user. So you see the ownership as you, but this is a mapping fudge. Way back in last millennium a BSD recovery disk did ignore all permissions to allow password recovery. Long since replaced by real read/write updating from recovery media.
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 08:55 GMT Liam Proven
Re: Ownership nonsense
> The last time I mounted a Windows boot partition with Linux
Which was when? NTFS-3G, or NTFS3? This _really_ matters.
> it helpfully changed the ownership of every directory I looked at to be me, to I could read it.
I do not believe you.
I do this routinely. Almost all my machines except servers dual-boot. I commonly keep data files on a share partition accessible to both Windows and Linux for ease of interchange. I have been doing this for decades: it was WinXP that made me switch.
In other words, all my Windows boxes also have Linux and that Linux routinely mounts C: as /windows or something, often from /etc/fstab
NEVER ONCE have I seen this change permissions. It has NEVER EVER made a Windows volume unbootable.
> This, of course, rendered the drive unbootable.
When kernel 5.15 arrived I switched from NTFS-3G on FUSE to the kernel driver. This made some of my directories unwritable from Linux because suddenly the kernel picked up access permissions. So as I usually run Linux and rarely run Windows, I reset 'em. It's my disk, my files, and... well, excuse me going all Classical, but
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
;-)
(No it mustn't but it was irresistible.)
So I just did:
cd /windows
chmod -R 770 *
Bingo, I can do whatever TF I want, and you know what?
Windows does not give a monkey's proverbial. Works 100% perfectly. Windows doesn't even notice.
So I call BS.
> I'm sure it used to just blithely ignore the NTFS permissions, and read all files without changing everything.
FUSE did. Hasn't done for 5 years.
> Very handy for looking at \Windows\system32.
You can anyway.
> What does the new driver do?
It is a native FS now. It does what other native FSes do.
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Wednesday 22nd April 2026 08:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Ownership nonsense
"Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam"
What coding language is this? I tried executing this command on my dual booted computer and got some syntax errors. After consulting Copilot, I was advised to run the the following with root privileges:
"Microsoft delenda est"
This deleted my Microsoft boot directory, and all my Windows partitions (including, yes, the recovery partition). All freed up space was formatted as EXT4, and my Grub theme now has a flashing SPQR Linux logo on it.
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Monday 20th April 2026 23:08 GMT billdehaan
Solving a problem that doesn't exist
The only real NTFS issue I see Linux users complaining about is the ntfsfix utility. There's a reason the man page states that it "only repairs some fundamental NTFS inconsistencies, resets the NTFS journal file and schedules an NTFS consistency check for the first boot into Windows. Windows system metadata isn't (and can't) be duplicated by Linux.
If you're running an NTFS drive in a dual boot Linux and Windows environment, use the native chkdsk under Windows to fix things, not Linux tools.
And if you're running Linux and not dual booting into Windows, migrate NTFS drives to ext4 or btrfs.
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 02:38 GMT david 12
But is it any good?
The last time I used NTFS on Linux, (which I admit was a while ago), the distribution of the information on the disk was horrible, and made some things slow and difficult.
NTFS treats some file system objects as immovable. It is *legal* to sprinkle those small immovable objects like stars across the entire logical disk surface, and the file system isn't *corrupt*, or *broken*, but it's not optimal.
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Wednesday 22nd April 2026 15:51 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: But is it any good?
This no longer has any measurable impact whatsoever now we mostly have SSDs.
I still remember the halcyon days of the 1990's when running defrag on Windows was a scheduled monthly task to keep the slow spinning-rust from clogging up solid..
The satisfying feeling as, from the corner of your eye, you watched the poor, unloved Windows computer that you company insisted you have (despite being a Unix/network sysadmin) slowly tried to bring itself back into relevance..
(My main box I quickly installed linux on since it lived in the Solaris world a lot more happily than the Windows box I was supposed to be using full-time. I dug out a barely-capable bit of kit and stuck Windows on that in case my manager cared. He didn't. He wasn't technical but trusted those of us who were.)
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 07:26 GMT wolfetone
Strange behaviour
Reading through the comments this morning, all I am left wondering is what has happened to people's heads. So many are commenting "what is the point?" of this I almost thought it a joke.
Linux is used in so many different ways you'd run out of fingers and toes to count them on. People, rightly, have long since left Windoze behind and only run with Linux (or BSD) now so all of their hard drives, pen drives, external USB drives all run on some sort of native Linux filesystem. This development won't have any bearing on their day to day Linuxing. But what we are seeing right now are more and more Windoze users trying Linux via Bazite and Steam who want to leave Windoze behind. These users will still have Windoze machines running NTFS, with all their data etc on there, and they will need to access it. The same way all of us former Micro$lop whipping boys did when we were migrating from it to Linux.
These users who bellyache going "what's the point" would do well to remember where they've come from. There are plenty of them out there who haven't come to Linux yet, who will come to Linux, and their path to enlightenment needs to be as smooth as possible. It does no one any good to kick the ladder away after we've used it. We also need to make sure the drivers can be updated as and when Micro$lop change their minds on how it's used.
