Adding NTFS support to Red Hat Linux

The easiest way to add NTFS support to Red Hat Linux is to download an NTFS-enabled kernel in RPM format from the Linux NTFS Project. If you want to add NTFS support manually, read below.

Athough Red Hat Linux uses a modular kernel, it does not include read/read-write NTFS file system support in the standard kernels.

The following steps were used to enable NTFS file system support using Red Hat 7.3.93 (Limbo, a beta of Red Hat 8.0) with kernel 2.4.18-7.80 on an i686 architecture. You should be able to adopt these steps--obviously substituting your kernel's filename--for your kernel.

1. Install the source RPM of the kernel for your architecture.
rpm -ivh kernel-2.4.18-i686.src.rpm

2. cd /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

3. vi kernel-2.4.18-i686.config

Change:

# CONFIG_NTFS_FS is not set
# CONFIG_NTFS_RW is not set

To (for read-only NTFS support):

CONFIG_NTFS_FS=m

To (for read-write NTFS support; this is not recommended, as it may corrupt your NTFS partition):

CONFIG_NTFS_FS=m
CONFIG_NTFS_RW=y

4. cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS

5. Build the new kernel.
rpmbuild -bb --target i686 kernel-2.4.spec

6. Install the new kernel.
cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i686
rpm -ivh --force kernel-2.4.18-7.80.i686.rpm

NTFS support is now available in your running kernel. A reboot is not required unless you chose read-write NTFS support.

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Last modified: 01/15/2003