[ILUG] Mounting XP Partition

[Rick Moen]

Quoting double-oh-seven at secretservice.co.uk (double-oh-seven at secretservice.co.uk):

> Good enough to recover Admin passwords, a read operation as opposed to
> a write one AFAIK.... provided you process them in memory.

To my knowledge, the easiest way to "recover" NT Administrator passwords
is to reset them to some known value, though I could be wrong.  This
whole area's pretty foreign to my experience.  (I'm probably going to
fix that, and am certainly not bragging about my ignorance, just
acknowledging it.)

> Seriously, if it can't write new files to the partition, can't delete
> old files from the partition, and can only alter existing files
> provided it doesnt change the length of the file (kinda like changing
> the contents of an RPM without altering the MD5, technically possible,
> but practically and usefully impossible), then how exactly is it
> considered that this driver has write support?  Or am I reading your
> paragraph wrong?

I think you're reading it right -- and I _think_ I have the facts of the
matter right.  (I recently was set straight on the matter via private
mail by Szabolcs Szakacsits, author of the open-source ntfsresize
utility, after posting wrong information on the comp.os.linux.hardware
newsgroup.)  Certainly, if you're seeking practical, general-purpose
data interchange on a dual-boot Linux and NT/W2K/XP box, either
Captive-NTFS (http://www.jankratovhvil.net/project/captive/), Win4Lin,
VMware, or a shared FAT32 partition make a whole lot more sense today.
(Actually, there are some other solutions, too:  There are several
ext2/ext3 drivers for MS-Windows, and I swear I once saw a description
of some clever trick involving loopback filesystems, but can't remember
details.)

In the long term, the newer Linux driver is a major step forward despite
its current limitations because (1) it's come a long way very quickly,
and I expect it'll become more useful soon, and (2) being open-source,
its advances will never be lost to us just because somebody changes an
interface or ceases offering something.  (E.g., Microsoft Corp. can
break Captive-NTFS in a heartbeat if it cares with a tiny tweak to some
DLLs, but cannot break fully open-source solutions without also breaking
vast amounts of Win32 software.)

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