A tale of four drivers
Trying to configure a Squeeze install to access several NTFS partitions on the same
drive, I installed both ntfs-config and Disk-Manager. Apparently these two packages
are not related? I had the impression that DM was the gui/front end for ntfs-config but
apparently it isn't.
Still, once I had both of them on the system I opened DM and tried to add the NTFS
partitions to the system. It worked easily enough in that I just clicked on the list and it set
them up. But it did this rather weirdly. The driver it chose for those partitions by default
was "ntfs (Unknow Driver)" and the misspelled "Unknow" is how it is really described in
the list. Also in the list are plain "ntfs", "ntfs-fuse", and "ntfs-3g". Four different drivers?
Why so many? And why did it choose the strange one (last in the list) as the default?
Could that have been caused by having both DM and ntfs-config installed at the same
time? When I plug a thumb-drive formatted with ntfs into the machine, I see that it uses
"fuseblk" as the driver. Is that the same as "ntfs-fuse" in the DM list? Is that the preferred
default driver for Debian? Or is it ntfs-3g, which seems to be the one under most active
development? For now I am using ntfs-3g. But I'd like to be sure I am using the most
reliable driver so I don't screw up my data partitions.
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