i have a western digital 250gb internal hardrive routed through a maddog external mount... well this harddrive has everything on it i need for work and school and i cannot get to it.. i just loaded mandriva 2006 on my medion system wich previously had winxp on it (well it crashed for the fifth time so i went linux!!) whenever i connected the harddrive it made a desktop icon and showed in my computer folder but if i tried to access it my system said i was not an owner and could not read the files.. everyother fourm i have read said i had to format my drive but I NEED THE STUFF ON IT!!! AND I HAVE NO OTHER WAY TO GET TO IT!! do i have to break down and reinstall windows on my system??? and if i went to its properties it said that it was unreadable... is there any way to get to it??? then i disconnected my cd drive to run it as an internal harddrive and it read it in the control center as sda but it was partition in blue (windows) and it wouldn't let me change anything about it.. what do i do to get my files?????? X( and after i took it out my os hardrive is now reading as sda... i am confused!!

You may need 'umask=000' in your fstab options.

what does that mean?? i am reallllllyyyyy reallllly new at this!! so can you please explain this a lil more..

spaz

What filesystem did you format the drive with (ntfs)?

lazlow

yes, it was formatted and filled with windows.

spaz

Most detros do not include ntfs abilities out of the box. They can be added. I do not think that you can write to ntfs (not sure). Search your destro + ntfs.

Lazlow

It appears that your distro includes ntfs! You just need to change the persmisions of the dir where the drive is mounted. There are several ways you can do this, here is one.

open the file fstab in a text editor. It should be located /home/username/fstab.
look for an entry simular to:

dev/sda1 /media/usbdisk ntfs pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
change to
dev/sda1 /media/usbdisk ntfs ro uid=500 pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
You wil need to be root to do this.
I would recomend making a backup of the file prior to any changes.

You should also be able to access the drive as root; however that can be dangerous. As mistakes can cause system damage.

There is more info on ntfs, mounting, reading, and writing at linux-ntfs.

USB or IEEE-1394 (aka Firewire, i.Link) are setup as sda...sdz because they use the SCSI layer in Linux to handle the commands.

I suggest mounting the drive manually. Assuming the drive is /dev/sda1 and you created the directory /mnt/media type, 'mount -t auto -o ro /dev/sda1 /mnt/media'. This will mount the drive as read-only. Mounting it as read-only protects your data from stupid changes. Some setups may need 'mount -t auto -o ro,umask=222 /dev/sda1 /mnt/media' which will force permissions to 555 or read and execute for both directories and files for everybody.