With installations of Windows NT, 2000, and XP, there is the probability that the hard drive has been formatted with the NT File System (NTFS). So, for example, someone would ask these questions:
Question:
I have Windows XP installed on my computer, and the hard drive is partitioned with a single NTFS partition. When I boot up with the Puppy live-CD, the "home" file is not created on /root, so I can't have any permanent storage. Why doesn't Puppy work with NTFS?
Answer:
When the live-CD boots up, Puppy looks for a vfat, ext2/3 or reiserfs partition, in that order, and if found creates a 256M file on it, named "pup001". This file is actually a complete ext2 filesystem, and Puppy mounts this on /root, and it becomes your home folder and keeps all your personal files and settings. This is a very safe technique and is unlikely to mess up your hard drive as no partitions are being created or modified, just a file created.
Anyway, this technique has a problem when it comes to NTFS. Linux support for NTFS is not yet complete, and currently an NTFS partition can be mounted read-only but not written (safely) to. When Puppy boots up, if he can't find a vfat, ext2/3 or reiserfs partition, he gives up and only uses the ramdisk.
HOWEVER, Puppy version 0.9.7+ does have limited NTFS write support. That is, the Linux NTFS driver can safely write to a file if it already exists, but cannot safely create or resize a file.
SOLUTION: Bootup Windows XP, download pup001.zip∞ from the Puppy download site, unzip and save it to C:\pup001. Now reboot the Puppy live-CD and Puppy will use the pre-existing pup001 file as your home data file. Simple!
Puppy writes inside the pup001 file system without the 'host' file system's knowledge. That is the trick that makes it work on NTFS. The NTFS partition remains read only, but the file system inside pup001 is read write. This method circumvents the complex NTFS file system. NTFS does not need to keep track of space used, files, directories, or anything else inside pup001.
An interesting side effect is that the date in the pup001 will not change when seen from Windows even when the content changes.
How can I see the contents of C:\?
The file system where the pup001 file resides is automatically mounted under /mnt/home. You can browse in Rox to that folder and you will see the contents of C:\ (if that's where your pup001 file is).
