ReactOS Now Supports Installation on NTFS After Nearly a Decade of Work

The ReactOS project announced a major milestone in improving NTFS support. After nearly a decade of development, its NTFS driver now allows the operating system to be installed and run directly from an NTFS partition.

The announcement confirms the driver can now format NTFS partitions compatible with Windows. This long-awaited capability brings ReactOS closer to its goal of providing an open-source, Windows-compatible operating system.

NTFS support has been a challenging part of that effort. Although ReactOS has supported reading NTFS volumes for years, installing and running the operating system from such a partition was not possible. Until now, FAT-based filesystems were the practical choice for ReactOS installations.

The latest improvements change this. Users can now install ReactOS directly onto an NTFS partition and use the operating system with its own NTFS driver handling filesystem operations. Adding formatting support means ReactOS can create NTFS partitions without external tools.

ReactOS can now be installed on NTFS partitions.

However, developers caution that the driver is still incomplete. It lacks caching, causing lower performance, and journaling and filesystem security features remain unsupported. Undiscovered bugs may exist, so the new functionality should be considered experimental.

The team also clarified that NTFS boot support was added to the FreeLoader bootloader back in 2022. The latest achievement builds on that earlier work by making the filesystem driver capable of supporting an actual ReactOS installation.

The announcement follows the release of ReactOS 0.4.16 in August, which introduced a graphical installer, a combined installation and live image, improved hardware compatibility, and numerous storage-related fixes.

The newly announced NTFS improvements are part of ongoing development, not a new stable release. ReactOS 0.4.16 remains the latest official version, and the operating system is still classified as alpha software.

ReactOS is a free and open-source operating system designed to run Windows applications and drivers without relying on Microsoft’s Windows code. Unlike Wine, which provides Windows compatibility on Unix-like systems, ReactOS implements its own Windows NT-compatible operating system.

Image credits: ReactOS