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> I want them to be able to access the entire NTFS drive. I’ve got two drives, a 120gb that contains Ubuntu, and a 250gb that is formatted to NTFS for the Windows side of the house. I’m going through the Samba install document that you posted, and so far, that appears to be what I’m looking to do for now. I want the family to be able to access the NTFS (I keep having to correct that - one of the programs I work with is called NFTS, so if you see that, forgive me :) ) drive - if we can do it without them having to use a login/password, that would be great.

Linux can't write to NTFS (by default).

Use a Linux native filesystem, such as "ext3". Let Samba take care of making it look Windows-friendly.

AFAIK, an NTFS partition on Ubuntu is read-only at best, unless you fork over $bux$ to somebody for a read-write driver.

I share ext3 to Windows users at my company and at home using Samba. Works just dandy.

Ok - I understand the need to convert the 250gb to EXT3 - I’ve gone looking and can’t find much that indicates I’ll be able to convert to that format on the fly - so once I get the server up to a point where I can access the drive, I’m going to have to convert half of it to EXT3, move everything over to it, convert the other half, and then merge. Quicker/easier than trying to move everything off the share, convert, and move back.

"Linux can't write to NTFS (by default). "

That used to be true. Starting with Ubuntu 8.04 and up (Hardy Heron) that capability has been included.

As well, even if you don't use that, there is an utility/driver called ntfs-3g that allows it.