First, you need to understand that Linux system have a single "file system," with physical devices (drives, USP, network, memory, processes) all in what Windows calls "folders." So, your question about "copying" really amounts to "How can I copy a file from one folder to another folder?" Sounds simple, eh? Well, it is actually that simple once you've located the folders and files.
The "permissions" problem is, mostly, an artifact of the Ubuntu policy of installing with the root (i.e., "Administrator" in Windows-speak) account
disabled so, if you need root privileges to run a command, you need to precede the command with a
sudo.
First, go to the System application menu item, and select the "Terminal" item. (What follows is best done from the command line.)
If you want to access some files on your NTSF drive, you need to make that drive's contents a "folder" in the Ubuntu file system. Assuming that you'd want to have your NTFS files "available" every time you boot Ubuntu, and that you'd also want to be able to write to your NTFS drive partitions from Ubuntu, the easiest thing to do is make entries in the
/etc/fstab file to tell Ubuntu the name of the partition's folder and how you want to access it. First, though, you'll need to do some housekeeping:
Enter the command
sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g to make sure that the driver needed to access your NTFS drives is installed.
When that finishes, type in
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid to see the UUID of the partitions on your drives. (You'll need the UUID for the next step. Here's a copy of the output of that command on my laptop, with the kind of line for which you should look highlighted in red:
Code:
$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-01-15 07:13 17841f9e-fa3a-4850-aa52-0e6d0ba242e3 ->../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-01-15 07:13 22b2553f-6199-4b82-b20c-6ad7c7b6688f ->../../sda6
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-01-15 07:13 2C88743C8874071C -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-01-15 07:13 342D7D7923AC4107 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-01-15 07:13 92ff1a1e-9e16-4828-953e-fbdfde536452 ->../../sdb1
(Typically,
sda is your first hard drive, and
sdb your second drive.) The UUIDs of NTFS partitions are (again, usually) shorter than Linux UUIDs. Note that the number after the sd[ab] is the partition number, which should also be a clue about which UUID is which.
Once you've identified the partition(s) you want to attach to you file system, you need to create a place where they can be attached. Conventionally, those "places" are created as "sub-folders" of the
/mnt folder, although you can, in fact, put the attachment place almost anywhere you want to put it.
For now, let's assume you want to be conventional, and make a place in the
/mnt directory for the partition to go.
Enter the command
sudo mkdir /mnt/xp (The "xp" is just a suggestion. You can, of course, use anything you want to use.)
Now you need to modify the
/etc/fstab file to tell Ubuntu how to attach the XP partition.
Enter the command
sudo gedit /etc/fstab & to open the file in the editor. (The "&" at the end of the command tells Linux to not wait for the editor to finish before it processes the next command from the terminal.) Go to the bottom of the
fstab file and enter a line like this, where the part you need to change is, again, highlighted in red. (Note that you can select the UUID from the output in the terminal window, copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into the file.)
Code:
UUID=342D7D7923AC4107 /mnt/xp ntfs-3g rw,defaults 0 0
Save the changed file but don't yet close the editor. It's prudent to check that things work before burning the bridge we crossed, eh?
Click in the terminal window and enter the command
sudo mount /mnt/xp If that works, OK, if not you should get an error message telling you what's wrong, and you can go back to the editor and fix the problem. (That's why I suggested you leave it open.)
If the
mount worked, verify that the NTFS file system is readable by listing its "top" level contents with a
ls /mnt/xp command (without the "sudo" prefix to verify that you can read the XP
C: drive without "root" privileges. You could also try a
cp /mnt/xp/<some file name> /tmp to check that you can do the copy you asked about.
If all that works, you're done so you can close the
gedit and terminal windows.
Note that there's really no reason to copy the files from the XP drive to the Ubuntu drive since, with the setup I described, you can use both drive from Ubuntu. If you're interested, there are XP (and Vista) drivers available (for free) that will let you access your Ubuntu drives from XP. They just attach the Ubuntu file system with a Windows "drive letter." Of course, only the actual files in the file system will be available from Windows since the "non-file" entries need the Ubuntu kernel running to exist.
