ReactOS reaches major milestone with NTFS install support - Ars Technica
ReactOS gains NTFS install support with new driver. Open source Windows alternative ReactOS has reached a major milestone: The operating system can now be installed directly onto an NTFS drive partition. The ReactOS project may never be a truly viable alternative to Windows for most users, but this step forward means that at least now it can be installed on the same filesystem as the real thing.
ReactOS gains NTFS install support with new driver.
Open source Windows alternative ReactOS has reached a major milestone: The operating system can now be installed directly onto an NTFS drive partition. As reported by Phoronix, the move to NTFS clears a long-standing hurdle for the project and brings it one step closer to finally reaching beta.
Prior to this latest announcement, ReactOS required users to keep a FAT32 partition for installations. A proprietary Microsoft-developed filesystem, NTFS can trace its roots back through the Windows NT family lineage starting in 1993 with Windows NT 3.1. The variant introduced with Windows XP in 2001 remains the standard used by most Windows systems today. With ReactOS’s stated goal of reaching binary compatibility with Windows Server 2003, being confined to FAT32 partitions was a practical barrier to clear on the way to reproducing the Windows environment.
However, users looking to hop off the Windows train shouldn’t be grabbing their bags just yet. ReactOS wrote that the new driver still “lacks caching (which causes inferior performance), journaling and security support.” So while the new driver is here, even the most intrepid of OS tinkerers should tread carefully. The ReactOS team warned in its announcement on X that there are still “potentially undiscovered bugs.”
The new driver closes a gap in development of nearly a decade. Read-only NTFS support was added to ReactOS all the way back in 2016, with boot support landing on FreeLoader in 2022. That meant that ReactOS’s bootloader could read from an NTFS partition, but the OS was unable to be directly installed there.
ReactOS is a community-developed open source project that describes itself as “mostly driven by volunteers.” Development is coordinated through public channels like GitHub and the project’s forums. Those who might be interested in lending a hand to ReactOS’s development can visit the project website to learn more about how to contribute. The project’s decades-long timeline underscores the scope and difficulty of reimplementing an operating system from scratch, and why the project has remained in alpha for so long.
The ReactOS project may never be a truly viable alternative to Windows for most users, but this step forward means that at least now it can be installed on the same filesystem as the real thing.