How do you do it?

Can you guys help me please.

What distro are you running and what kind of setup do you have?? HDs and their partitions. What kind of file system is the windows partition and what windows are you running? NEED MORE INFO.

Jeff Smith

Oops, i knew there was something missing, sorry about that.

Mandrake 9.1
Windows XP Home is on a Seagate 120Gb(C:\)
Linux is on a Maxtor 20Gb(E:\)

well windows xp is ntfs drive. what are their address in linux /dev/hda and /dev/hdb? from the command line run fdisk <drive address> then at the prompt type p to print the partition tables and paste them here for both drives. and did you install the src code so you can recompile the kernel, unless you added ntfs support when you installed. the src code should be found in /usr/src/<version>

Jeff Smith

im a noob at linux(obviously) and am confused at what your saying......

can you type it in english, or can someone else give me basic help?

If that doesn't help you can always try to help yourself. Look on the internet for importing NTFS filesystem to Mandrake 9.1 I'm sure there is some documentation somewhere.

Jeff Smith
p.s.
If you have enough time to ask the question, you probably have enough time to look for the answer...

Hey Xpressah,

WinXP uses the NT filesystem (ntfs) which may not be a part of your kernel (the software that interacts with your computer components and lets your programs use that hardware). But let's check first.

First, log in as a normal user. Ok? Then open up a terminal (the place where you can type at the command line). Then, as was suggested use this command

/bin/su

then enter your password. Ok?

Now run fdisk -l

Copy everything it prints by highlighting everything and then using your "third" mouse button to paste into a message here at the forum.

You should see that you have more than one harddrive printing out when you run fdisk -l

You will probably see a list with a few /dev/hda* and /dev/hdb* terms listed. They will have numbers in the asterisk to indicate the number of the partition.

So, if fdisk -l lists more than /dev/hda (your Maxtor harddisk I am sure), you will be able to get music from the windows partitions.

If you see the windows partition, then you use the command locate fstab to find this file. Open it up with a text editor--vi or emacs--(make sure to exit FIRST so that you are no longer the root user). Then copy and paste into your next post. It is probably safe to assume that this drive is not being mounted though so you can just try this:

First as root user umount /mnt/winXP if you get some error "not found" then just ignore it and do the following as root

mkdir /mnt/winXP (enter)
then mount /dev/hdb* /mnt/winXP
then cd /mnt/winXP

if you DIDNT get an error (which is totally unlikely) then skip mkdir /mnt/winXP

Now you have access! As the root user you can use your music. You might try cd /mnt/winXP as a regular user. I am not sure if this will work or not. You may be (havent tried on my computer) able to change the permissions of /mnt/winXP or put the windows partition in fstab with the hope of having it be mountable by any user, but for now I am not sure (then again my ntfs partitions are on a Dynamic Disk so my inability to chmod the ntfs partitions may be due to that).

Sorry bout the last paragraph....rambling...

Anyway, if fdisk -l shows nothing, then you probably dont have ntfs compiled into your kernel....You will have to look around to get that done. I use Debian and kernel compiling is very easy so Im not sure about doing it on other systems.