What was Paragon to do with a pro-open-source Microsoft? Well, at first, the company rapidly went into the first three stages of grief: Denial and isolation, anger, and bargaining. Today's Microsoft has realized it was on the wrong side of history with open source. But, while Paragon did well with this as a business for years, Microsoft was no longer the proprietary powerhouse it had been under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. The result was a fast, efficient, and, yes, proprietary NTFS Linux system. Paragon produced its software in partnership with Microsoft. Its Microsoft NTFS for Linux by Paragon Software used the proprietary Paragon File System Link, a cross-platform file system driver to read and write from NTFS drives. While the open-source community was working on these projects, the company Paragon was taking a different approach. The code itself is still around, but the project itself is long dead. In the event, the project didn't last for long. Using a proprietary driver in open-source software is always troublesome, especially back in those bad old days. To pull this trick off, however, it used the original Windows ntfs.sys driver. The Captive NTFS driver could read and write to NTFS. You can find out for yourself soon by testing the userspace NTFS-3G against the new Linux kernel NTFS3 driver. Ntfsmount - Mount an NTFS partition from user-space using libntfs and FUSE.NTFS-3G's creator and CTO of Tuxera, its parent company, Szabolcs Szakacsits, however, told Torvalds that a better review of NTFS-3G and the new Linux kernel NTFS driver will show the " user space ntfs-3g was about 21% faster overall than the kernel space ntfs3." That said, Szakacsits added that "Ntfs-3g always aimed for stability, features, interoperability, and portability, not for best possible performance." He also added "Userspace drivers can have major disadvantages for certain workloads" but then asksed "how relevant are those for NTFS users?" Ntfscp - Overwrite files on an NTFS partition. Ntfscat - Concatenate files and print their contents on the standard output. Ntfsls - List information about files in a directory residing on an NTFS partition. Ntfsinfo - Show some information about an NTFS partition or one of the files or directories within it. Ntfscluster - Locate the owner of any given sector or cluster on an NTFS partition. Ntfsclone - Efficiently create/restore an image of an NTFS partition. Ntfsundelete - Recover deleted files from an NTFS volume. Ntfslabel - Display/change the label of an NTFS partition. See man 8 mkntfs for command line options. Mkntfs - Format a partition with the NTFS filesystem. Ntfsfix - Attempt to fix an NTFS partition and force Windows to check NTFS. The following utilities are so far implemented: NetRestore Helper will not use the NTFS-3G driver to work its magic.Īlso, for the sake of my own documentation, the following is from the provided ntfsprogs docs.
SO, on the external drive, make sure you only have the ntfsprogs installed. You should be able to image the (internal) partition containing Windows.Ģ) There is a conflict between ntfsprogs and NTFS-3G (which you may have installed to read/write to your Windows partition). Boot into that (external) OS, which has NetRestore Helper and ntfsprogs installed. Rather, you should have an external drive with a bootable Mac OS on it. That is, if you have a BootCamp-ed drive and are running Mac OS from that internal drive, you will NOT be able to create an image of the Windows partition. A couple of important points to make:ġ) NetRestore Helper will not image a partition on the same physical device as the running OS. NetRestore Helper provides NTFS partition imaging if the ntfsprogs are installed.