Near quarter century old musings ...
NTFS first shipped with NT 3.1 ... mid 1993. NTFS was quite stable (for me!) in every version of NT that I used it with, right from the git-go. NT had read/write access to HPFS starting with NT 3.1, and could even be installed on an HPFS partition (remember, NT was supposed to be a version of OS/2. Also remember that MS also wrote HPFS, not IBM). Microsoft depreciated the use of HPFS starting with NT 4.0. Both NTFS and HPFS (and every other serious FS that I am aware of) can be marked read-only. The biggest problem with HPFS is that it wasn't a journaling FS. The other major issue was that NTFS and HPFS used the same partition type (07); some badly written disk utilities didn't differentiate between the two, causing all kinds of screwups when well meaning, if ignorant, users ran the wrong tools on the wrong partitions ...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
