I have what I tried below, but I eventually dropped the attempt. The Lenovo modules hung up VMWare any time I tried to boot it that way, and while I could mount the NTFS partition used by WinXP R/W with the tools below, I could not easily get WinXP to look at the lion's share of the drive. (My fault, really – if I weren't so attached to other filesystem types, I could probably have made this work).

Dual Boot

My new-fangled laptop comes with XP Pro, and I don't have disks for re-installing that OS from scratch (in VMWare, for example). So, as an experiment, I decided to resize the WinXP partition, and put gentoo on the lion's share of the drive. I want to see if I can get a dual-boot OR VMWare image running off of that same base – because I think that would be cool¹. File access would be interesting – but that's another story; I want to see if it will work, first. As part of that effort, I also added support for R/W NTFS².

• sys-fs/ntfsprogs-1.13.1

While poking around, I read up on NTFS³ – and I think, based on the interoperability section, that I'll also look into ntfs-3g. Note that this requires the freshest version of fuse, which means: don't compile CONFIG_FUSE_FS into your kernel. Either compile it as a module, or leave it out entirely.

• sys-fs/fuse-2.6.0
• sys-fs/ntfs3g-0.20061115-r1

Footnotes / References :

¹ Dual-boot with Grub [geocities.com/epark/linux/] , and Running VMWare on a Physical Partition

² HOWTO NTFS write with ntfsmount [gentoo-wiki.com]

³ NTFS :wiki: