After hunting for a while, I found this little driver that allows you to both read and write to any ntfs partition from linux. I've been using it for a few hours now and nothing is wrong with my ntfs partitions (the default linux driver majorly screws up partitions). The project is called captive-ntfs and can be found at http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/ . It's basically only useful if you're dual booting, but hey, tons of us are.

Cheers,
cgkanchi